Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite hope, which degrades all it has done? Genius counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own idea it never executed.

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well. What satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word politics ....?

Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.

I think the vice of our housekeeping is that it does not hold man sacred. The vice of government, the vice of education, the viceof religion, is one with that of the private life.

Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations. The only sin is limitation. As soon as you once come up with a man's limitations, it is all over with him.

The age of puberty is a crisis in the age of man worth studying. It is the passage from the unconscious to the conscious; from thesleep of passions to their rage.

We want a state of things in which crime will not pay, a state of things which allows every man the largest liberty compatible with the liberty of every other man.

As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action.

The saint and poet seek privacy to ends the most public and universal: and it is the secret of culture, to interest the man more in his public, than in his private quality.

Those who have ruled human destinies, like planets, for thousands of years, were not handsome men.

A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light.

The height, the deity of man is to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is good when it does not violate me, but best when it is likest to solitude.

Begin and proceed on a settled conviction that but little is permitted to any man to do or to know, and if he complies with the first grand laws, he shall do well.

Every man should let out all the length of all the reigns; should find or make a frank and healthy expression of what force and meaning is in him.

Overhead the sanctities of the stars shine forever-more... pouring satire on the pompous business of the day which they close, and making the generations of men show slight and evanescent.

Happy the man who never puts on a face, but receives every visitor with that countenance he has on.

No society can ever be so large as one man.

If the gatherer gathers too-much, Nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest; swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates, monopolies and exceptions.

It is said, no man can write but one book; and if a man have a defect, it is apt to leave its impression on all his performances.

There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not interest us,--kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron show,--the rootsof all things are in man.

Man is the dwarf of himself.

For, rightly, every man is a channel through which heaven floweth, and, whilst I fancied I was criticising him, I was censuring orrather terminating my own soul.

We are such lovers of self-reliance, that we excuse in a man many sins, if he will show us a complete satisfaction in his position, which asks no leave to be, of mine, or any man's good opinion.

The finished man of the world must eat of every apple once.