Essays, First Series Quotes

“A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson , Essays, First Series

“When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest things we can know.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, First Series

“Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, First Series

“Travelling is a fool's paradise. We owe to our first journeys the discovery that place is nothing. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern Fact, the sad self, unrelenting identical that I fled from.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, First Series

“Let us take our bloated nothingness out of the path of the divine circuits.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, First Series

“I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don't believe I deserved my friends.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, First Series

“Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, First Series

“The most wonderful inspirations die with their subject, if he has no hand to paint them to the senses.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, First Series

“My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, First Series

“I will receive from them not what they have but what they are.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, First Series

“When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, First Series

“For it is a fire that kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature with its generous flames.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays - First Series

“Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scanderbeg, and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue?”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, First Series

“We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself,—must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know. What the former age has epitomized into a formula or rule for manipular convenience, it will lose all the good of verifying for itself, by means of the wall of that rule. Somewhere, sometime, it will demand and find compensation for that loss, by doing the work itself.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, First Series

“There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays - First Series

“Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign?”
― Waldo Ralph Emerson, Essays, First Series

“you gather apples in the sunshine, or make hay, or”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays - First Series

“Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole. You cannot recall the spoken word, you cannot wipe out the foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or clew. Some damning circumstance always transpires. The laws and substances of nature, — water, snow, wind, gravitation — become penalties to the thief.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, First Series