Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

If we follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last.

Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.

Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All

He in whom the love of truth predominates . . . submits to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion; but he is a candidate for truth . . . and respects the highest law of his being.

Everything is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour if seen as experience.

Is not prayer a study of truth, a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose.

Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it.

Dreams have a poetic integrity and truth. This limbo and dust-hole of thought is presided over by a certain reason, too.

There is ever a slight suspicion of the burlesque about earnest good men.

What is a man born for but to be a reformer, a remaker of what has been made, a denouncer of lies, a restorer of truth and good?

[on Thoreau:] For not a particle of respect had he to the opinions of any man or body of men, but homage solely to truth itself.

A system-grinder hates the truth.

The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.

When a man speaks the truth in the spirit of truth, his eye is as clear as the heavens. When he has base ends, and speaks falsely, the eye is muddy, and sometimes asquint.

The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.

For he that feeds men serveth few; He serves all who dares be true.

Best masters for the young writer and speaker are the fault- finding brothers and sisters at home who will not spare him, but willpick and cavil, and tell the odious truth.

Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyph to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth.

A man is not to aim at innocence, any more than he is to aim at hair, but he is to keep it.

The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon.

Instead of making Christianity a vehicle of truth, you make truth only a horse for Christianity.

The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existance of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well.

You need not fear to handle the truth roughly. She is no invalid.