Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are people who have an appetite for grief; pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation.

I, too late,Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.

They reckon ill who leave me out;When me they fly, I am the wings;I am the doubter and the doubt,And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

Speak the affirmative; emphasize your choice by utter ignoring of all that you reject.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting — a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.

He who loves the bristle of bayonets only sees in the glitter what beforehand he feels in his heart. It is avarice and hatred; it is that quivering lip, that cold, hating eye, which built magazines and powder-houses.

In May, when sea winds pierced our solitudes,I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods.

The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

One more fagot of these adamantine bandages is the new science of Statistics.

Instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party. Pounding beans is good to the end of pounding empires one of these days; but if, at the end of years, it is still only beans!

Rhodora! if the sages ask thee whyThis charm is wasted on the earth and sky,Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.

Look out into the July night, and see the broad belt of silver flame which flashes up the half of heaven, fresh and delicate as the bonfires of the meadow-flies. Yet the powers of numbers cannot compute its enormous age,—lasting as space and time,—embosomed in time and space.

Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.

We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust,So near is God to man,When Duty whispers low, Thou must,The youth replies, I can.

A man's library is a sort of harem.

Nature is sanative, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses, and violets, and morning dew! Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love.

'Tis curious that we only believe as deeply as we live.

There are always two parties, the party of the Past and the party of the Future; the Establishment and the Movement.

Coal is a portable climate.

I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.