Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing.

It facilitates labor and thought so much that there is always the temptation in large schools to omit the endless task of meeting the wants of each single mind, and to govern by steam. But it is at frightful cost. Our modes of Education aim to expedite, to save labor; to do for masses what cannot be done for masses, what must be done reverently, one by one: say rather, the whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil.

I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.

We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.

The world -- this shadow of the soul, or other me, lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding tumult...So much only of life as I know by experience...The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power.

Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it.

Turn the eye upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it any time these twenty years!

It is not often the worst trait that occasions the loudest outcry. Men complain of their suffering and not of the crime.

We are like travelers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs.

Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth in him ... I see not how it can be otherwise.

When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, ? is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old, can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if it all depended on this particular up or down.

The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.

Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual.

The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.

Does not… the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound?

The point of imperfection which we occupy -- is it on the way up or down?

Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history.

God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.

See how the masses of men worry themselves into nameless graves, while here and there a great unselfish soul forgets himself into immortality.

good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This

It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books. They impress us with the conviction, that one nature wrote and the same reads.