Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

The divine gift is ever the instant life, which receives and uses and creates, and can well bury the old in the omnipotency with which Nature decomposes all her harvest for recomposition.

A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there; but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

God enters by a private door into each individual.

The borrowing is often honest enough, and comes of magnanimity and stoutness. A great man quotes bravely and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good.

In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended.

Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

Nor knowest thou what argumentThy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent.All are needed by each one;Nothing is fair or good alone.

We must not tamper with the organic motion of the soul.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate.

Things added to things, as statistics, civil history, are inventories. Things used as language are inexhaustibly attractive.

EnclosedIn a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,And all their botany is Latin names.

We may like well to know what is Plato's and what is Montesquieu's or Goethe's part, and what thought was always dear to the writer himself; but the worth of the sentences consists in their radiancy and equal aptitude to all intelligence. They fit all our facts like a charm. We respect ourselves the more that we know them.

The mind will quote whether the tongue does or not.

Of all debts, men are least willing to pay their taxes; what a satire this is on government.

So of all the particulars of health and exercise, and fit nutriment, and tonics. Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.

All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs, by imitation.

Speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon-balls and to-tomorrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.

Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.

I honor health as the first muse, and sleep as the condition of health. Sleep benefits mainly by the sound health it produces; incidentally also by dreams, into whose farrago a divine lesson is sometimes slipped.

Most of the classical citations you shall hear or read in the current journals or speeches were not drawn from the originals, but from previous quotations in English books...

Health is the first muse, comprising the magical benefits of air, landscape, and bodily exercise on the mind.