The Portable Emerson Quotes

“Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“Thoreau was in his own person a practical answer, almost a refutation, to the theories of the socialists. He required no Phalanx, no Government, no society, almost no memory. He lived extempore from hour to hour, like the birds and the angels; brought every day a new proposition, as revolutionary as that of yesterday, but different: the only man of leisure in his town; and his independence made all others look like slaves.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“I look upon the simple and childish virtues of veracity and honesty as the root of all that is sublime in character. Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds. I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my word as good as my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined, to all the éclat in the universe.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“Add the consent of will and temperament, and there exists the covenant of friendship. Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can. This is the service of a friend. With him we are easily great. There is a sublime attraction in him to whatever virtue is in us. How he flings wide the doors of existence!”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“In short there is no man who is not at some time indebted to his vices, as no plant that is not fed from manures”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“What is the city in which we sit here, but an aggregate of incongruous materials which have obeyed the will of some man? The granite was reluctant, but his hands were stronger, and it came. Iron was deep in the ground and well combined with stone, but could not hide from his fires.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“You shall see in society, numbers of discontented men, who complain that the doors of preferment are closed upon them; that prejudices stand in their way; that a hard measure is dealt to them; that with equal merit as others, they meet an unequal difficulty. And that if they can only obtain an advantageous situation in a foreign country they imagine that they can at any time quit their own neighborhood or their own country & in another part of the world where they are unknown there is no impediment to the most brilliant success. Be not deceived. You carry your fortunes in your own hand.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“un des plus grands malheurs des honnêtes gens c’est qu’ils sont des lâches”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“Whoever has had experience of the moral sentiment cannot choose but believe in unlimited power. Each pulse from that heart is an oath from the Most High. I know not what the word sublime means, if it be not the intimations, in this infant, of a terrific force.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“The force with which we resist these torrents of tendency looks so ridiculously inadequate that it amounts to little more than a criticism or protest made by a minority of one, under compulsion of millions. I seemed in the height of a tempest to see men overboard struggling in the waves, and driven about here and there. They glanced intelligently at each other, but ’t was little they could do for one another; ’t was much if each could keep afloat alone. Well, they had a right to their eye-beams, and all the rest was Fate.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“But Nature is no sentimentalist,—does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman, but swallows your ship like a grain of dust.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“I thought it was this fair mystery, whose foundations are hidden in eternity, which made the basis of human society, and of law; and that to pretend anything else, as that the acquisition of property was the end of living, was to confound all distinctions, to make the world a greasy hotel, and, instead of noble motives and inspirations, and a heaven of companions and angels around and before us, to leave us in a grimacing menagerie of monkeys and idiots.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“If our resistance to this law is not right, there is no right. This is not meddling with other people’s affairs: this is hindering other people from meddling with us.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“A man’s right to liberty is as inalienable as his right to life.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“The sickness of the last week was fine medicine; pain disintegrated the spirit, or became spiritual. I rose,—I felt that I had given to God more perhaps than an angel could,—had promised Him in youth that to be a blot on this fair world, at His command, would be acceptable. Constantly offer myself to continue the obscurest and loneliest thing ever heard of, with one proviso,—His agency. Yes, love Thee, and all Thou dost, while Thou sheddest frost and darkness on every path of mine.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“War devastates the conscience of men, yet corrupt peace does not less”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“Channing paints its miseries, but does he know those of a worse war,—private animosities, pinching, bitter warfare of the human heart, the cruel oppression of the poor by the rich, which corrupts old worlds?”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“For the arch-abolitionist, older than Brown, and older than the Shenandoah Mountains, is Love, whose other name is Justice, which was before Alfred, before Lycurgus, before slavery, and will be after it.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“I do not mean by “gentlemen,” people of scented hair and perfumed handkerchiefs, but men of gentle blood and generosity, “fulfilled with all nobleness,” who, like the Cid, give the outcast leper a share of their bed; like the dying Sidney, pass the cup of cold water to the dying soldier who needs it more. For what is the oath of gentle blood and knighthood? What but to protect the weak and lowly against the strong oppressor?”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“This was all settled millions of years before the world was made.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“But the colored boy had no friend, and no future. This worked such indignation in him that he swore an oath of resistance to slavery as long as he lived. And thus his enterprise to go into Virginia and run off five hundred or a thousand slaves was not a piece of spite or revenge, a plot of two years or of twenty years, but the keeping of an oath made to heaven and earth forty-seven years before.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“Yet the tenderness was only a face of the wit; as before, the wit was raised above all other wit by the affection behind it. And, truly, there was an ocean of tears always, in her atmosphere, ready to fall.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“But Bonaparte knew better than society; and moreover knew that he knew better. I think all men know better than they do; know that the institutions we so volubly commend are go-carts and baubles”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“History is full, down to this day, of the imbecility of kings and governors. They are a class of persons much to be pitied, for they know not what they should do. The weavers strike for bread, and the king and his ministers, knowing not what to do, meet them with bayonets.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the government is changed, and the march of civilization is a train of felonies,—yet, general ends are somehow answered. We see, now, events forced on which seem to retard or retrograde the civility of ages. But the world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves cannot drown him.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“Our life is March weather, savage and serene in one hour. We go forth austere, dedicated, believing in the iron links of Destiny, and will not turn on our heel to save our life: but a book, or a bust, or only the sound of a name, shoots a spark through the nerves, and we suddenly believe in will: my finger-ring shall be the seal of Solomon; fate is for imbeciles; all is possible to the resolved mind. Presently a new experience gives a new turn to our thoughts: common sense resumes its tyranny;”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“Knowledge is the knowing that we can not know. The dull pray; the geniuses are light mockers.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“He has no personal friends, for he who has the spell to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto him needs not husband and educate a few to share with him a select and poetic life. His relation to men is angelic; his memory is myrrh to them; his presence, frankincense and flowers”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson

“It was not, however, found easy to embody the readily admitted principle that property should make law for property, and persons for persons; since persons and property mixed themselves in every transaction. At last it seemed settled that the rightful distinction was that the proprietors should have more elective franchise than non-proprietors, on the Spartan principle of “calling that which is just, equal; not that which is equal, just.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson