Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are speedily punished-by fear...be honest with a man and you have no fear. Try to deceive and the relationship deteriorates.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.

Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.

A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.

In all things I would have the island of a man inviolate. Let us sit apart as the gods, talking from peak to peak all round Olympus. No degree of affection need invade this religion.

For a great nature, it is a happiness to escape a religious training; religion of character is so apt to be invaded.

The multitude of false churches accredits the true religion.

The merit claimed for the Anglican Church is that if you let it alone it will let you alone.

There is a crack in everything God has made.

Men are respectable only as they respect.

There is one other reason for dressing well, namely that dogs respect it, and will not attack you in good clothes.

There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutual respect, until, in their dialogue, each stands for the whole world.

Let a man then know his worth and keep things under his feet.

There are two classes of poets - the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.

The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed.

Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as two sides of an algebraic equation.

Perhaps love is only the highest symbol of friendship, as all other things seem symbols of love.

I like to have a person's knowledge comprehend more than one class of topics, one row of shelves. I like a person who likes to see a fine barn as well as a good tragedy.

Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge.

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.

Knowledge is the knowing that we cannot know.