Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.

Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth.

The world exists for the education of each man.

There is a kind of latent omniscience, not only in every man, but in every particle.

There are men too superior to be seen except by a few, as there are notes too high for the scale of most ears.

When a man says to me, "I have the intensest love of nature," at once I know that he has none.

Ever the words of the gods resound; But the porches of man's ear seldom in this low life's round are unsealed, that he may hear.

He is a good man, who can receive a gift well. We are either glad or sorry at a gift, and both emotions are unbecoming.

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

Man is a piece of the universe made alive

There is no one who does not exaggerate. In conversation, men are encumbered with personality, and talk too much.

All great natures delight in stability; all great men find eternity affirmed in the very promise of their faculties.

Every man I meet is in some way my superior...

I have only one doctrine, the infinitude of the private man.

A man of no conversation should smoke.

A hero is a man who is afraid to run away.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.

If you love and serve man, you cannot, by any hiding or stratagem, escape remuneration.

To be a man is to be a nonconformist.

Unhappily, no man exists who has not in his own person become, to some amount, a stockholder in the sin, and so made himself liable to a share in the expiation.

Men in all ways are better than they seem.