Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser.

A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

Without electricity, the air would rot.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

Whom God has put asunder, why should man put together?

True friends are two people who are comfortable sharing silence together.

When we can't piece together the puzzle of our own lives, remember the best view of a puzzle is from above. Let Him help put you together.

With most men, scarce a link of memory holds yesterday and to-day together.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

Do not follow where the path may lead.

For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?

Though we travel the world over to find beauty, we must carry it with us or we find it not . . . The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is a great difference in beholders.

No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby - so helpless and ridiculous.

We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.

In the woods we return to reason and faith.

As the gardener, by severe pruning, forces the sap of the tree into one or two vigorous limbs, so should you stop off your miscellaneous activity and concentrate your force on one or a few points.

As sunbeams stream through liberal space And nothing jostle or displace, So waved the pine-tree through my thought And fanned the dreams it never brought.

The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

If you believe in the soul, do not clutch at sensual sweetness before it is ripe on the slow tree of cause and effect.

A nation, like a tree, does not thrive well till it is engraffed with a foreign stock.

Live in the fields, and God will give you lectures on natural philosophy every day.

Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree.