Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.

Leave this military hurry and adopt the pace of Nature. Her secret is patience.

The true poem is the poet's mind; the true ship is the ship-builder.

All promise outruns the performance.

As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter, and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.

Science was false by being unpoetical. It assumed to explain a reptile or mollusc, and isolated it, — which is hunting for life in graveyards. Reptile or mollusc or man or angel only exists in system, in relation... Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science...

We must be our own, before we can be another's.

But it is a cold, lifeless business, when you go to the shops to buy me something which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's.

I honor health as the first muse, and sleep as the condition of health. Sleep benefits mainly by the sound health it produces; incidentally also by dreams, into whose farrago a divine lesson is sometimes slipped. Life is in short cycles or periods; we are quickly tired, but we have rapid rallies. A man... sinks into deep sleep and wakes with renewed youth, with hope, courage, fertile in resources, and keen for daring adventure.

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between two.

The believing we do something when we do nothing, is the first illusion of tobacco.

Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the 'Not Me,' that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, 'Nature.'

I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated, they fascinate.

A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope and eloquence in all whom she approaches.

Women, as most susceptible, are the best index of the coming hour.

Women see better than men. Men see lazily, if they do not expect to act. Women see quite without any wish to act.

A beautiful woman is a practical poet.

A woman's strength is the unresistible might of weakness.

The longer we live the more we must endure the elementary existence of men and women; and every brave heart must treat society asa child, and never allow it to dictate.

Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are.

Women have a less accurate measure of time than men; there is a clock in Adam, none in Eve.