Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,Arrives the snow.

The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.

A lady, with whom I was riding in the forest, said to me, that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer has passed onward: a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human feet.

If a man examine carefully his thoughts he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future. His well-being is always ahead.

Whatever we think and say is wonderfully better for our spirits and trust in another mouth.

Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.

It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.

If two or three persons should come with a high spiritual aim and with great powers, the world would fall into their hands like a ripe peach.

Many of the historical proverbs have a doubtful paternity.

I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms, could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine.

He who travels in search of something which he has not got, travels away from himself and grows old even in youth among old things.

As to what are called the masses, and common men—there are no common men. All men are at last of a size.

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.

[A]s if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand....

....whether your jewel was got from the mine or from an auctioneer.

The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.

When a man thinks happily, he finds no foot-track in the field he traverses. All spontaneous thought is irrespective of all else.

A chief event in life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.

A good intention but fixed and resolute - bent on high and holy ends, we shall find means to them on every side and at every moment; and even obstacles and opposition will but make us "like the fabled specter-ships," which sail the fastest in the very teeth of the wind.

A man is related to all nature.

A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat; self-control is the rule.

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.