Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whatever you do you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there will always be someone to tell you that you are wrong.

I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances.

The World exists for you ; Build therefore your own world

Vast spaces of nature; the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea; vast intervals of time, years, centuries, are of no account. This which I think and feel, underlay that former state of life and circumstances, as it does underlie my present, and will always circumstance, and what is called life, and what is called death.

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered you will never grow.

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds.

There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful.

Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar

New York is a sucked orange.

The word miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is a monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.

Great men exist that there may be greater men.

There is properly no history; only biography.

I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

Harder still it has proved to rule the dragon Money… A whole generation adopted false principles, and went to their graves in the belief they were enriching the country they were impoverishing.

The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.

Poet To mask the fiery thought, in simple words succeeds. For still the craft of genius is, To mask a king in weeds

In happy hours, nature appears to us one with art; art perfected, -- the work of genius. And the individual, in whom simple tastes and susceptibility to all the great human influences overpower the accidents of a local and special culture, is the best critic of art. Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.

A mind might ponder its thought for ages, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach it in a day.

Every man contemplates an angel in his future self

Thought is the bud, language the blossom and action the fruit behind it.

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and holds it fluid.