Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Exaggeration is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the world, without adding a small excess of his proper quality. Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so, to every creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance, a slight generosity, a drop too much.

We aim above the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it.

Coal lay in ledges under the ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the surface. We may will call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate.

I wiped away the weeds and foam,I fetched my sea-born treasures home;But the poor, unsightly, noisome thingsHad left their beauty on the shore,With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.

I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.

"Pass in, pass in," the angels say,"In to the upper doors,Nor count compartments of the floors,But mount to paradiseBy the stairway of surprise."

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

Do your thing & I shall know you.

A man may love a paradox without either losing his wit or his honesty.

Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home;Thou art not my friend and I'm not thine.

Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.

Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.

Good as is discourse, silence is better and shames it.

Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.

Every man is wanted, and no man is wanted much.

An eye can threaten like a loaded and levelled gun, or it can insult like hissing or kicking; or, in its altered mood, by beams of kindness, it can make the heart dance for joy.... One of the most wonderful things in nature is a glance of the eye; it transcends speech; it is the bodily symbol of identity.

A mollusk is a cheap edition [of man] with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster-bank or among the seaweed.

Men should take their knowledge from the Sun, the Moon and the Stars.

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds.

The hand that rounded Peter's dome,And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,Wrought in a sad sincerity;Himself from God he could not free;He builded better than he knew—The conscious stone to beauty grew.

If utterance is denied, the thought lies like a burden on the man. Always the seer is a sayer.

To think is to act.

When a man says to me, "I have the intensest love of nature," at once I know that he has none.