Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause.

Why should I hasten to solve every riddle which life offers me? I am well assured that the Questioner, who brings me so many problems, will bring me the answers also, in due time.

Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance,--what ample borrowers of eternity they are!

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.

Nor knowest thou what argument Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent. All are needed by each one; Nothing is fair or good alone.

The advantage in education is always with those children who slip up into life without being objects of notice.

Life has a way of demanding that you live it.

Life loiters at the book's first page,-- Ah! could we turn the leaf.

I would study, I would know, I would admire forever.

Life is to be lived, not controlled.

[A]s if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand.

Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar's dinner, from a hundred charities?

I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and blood. Every trait the artist recorded in stone, he had seen in life, and better than his copy.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. Football is four 15-minute quarters. Plus timeouts and commercials.

There are books... which rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences.

A ruddy drop of manly blood The surging sea outweighs; The world uncertain comes and goes, The lover rooted stays.

Venus, when her son was lost, Cried him up and down the coast, In hamlets, palaces, and parks, And told the truant by his marks,- Golden curls, and quiver, and bow.

Harmony of aim, not identity of conclusion, is the secret of sympathetic life.

Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity, and not for life.

Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.

Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation.