Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

The god of Victory is said to be one-handed, but Peace gives victory to both sides.

The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.

There's nothing capricious in nature, and the implanting of a desire indicates that its gratification is in the constitution of the creature that feels it.

Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.

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

Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same

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

The true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops – no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

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

I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Palestine, Italy, Spain, and the Islands, - the Genius and creative Principle of each and of all eras, in my own mind.

Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.

To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself.

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible

Work and learn in evil days, in insulted days, in days of debt and depression and calamity. Fight best in the shade of the cloud of arrows.

Sincerity is the highest complement you can pay

Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands. This can only be by his preferring truth to his past apprehension of truth; and his alert acceptance of it, from whatever quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws, his relations to society, his Christianity, his world may at any time be superseded and decease.

The influence of the senses has, in most men, overpowered the mind to the degree that the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet, time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul.

For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?

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

Good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.

Ralph Waldo Emerson "Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." ? Ralph Waldo Emerson