The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

“People only see what they are prepared to see.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! — it seems to say, — there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Only so much of life do I know as I have lived. ”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself and whatever science or art or course of action he engages in reacts upon and illuminates the recesses of his own mind. Thus friends seem to be only mirrors to draw out and explain to us ourselves; and that which draws us nearer our fellow man, is, that the deep Heart in one, answers the deep Heart in another, -- that we find we have (a common Nature) -- one life which runs through all individuals, and which is indeed Divine.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson , The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear under different names in every system of thought, whether they be called cause, operation and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit and the Son; but which we will call here the Knower, the Doer and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty. These three are equal. Each is that which he is, essentially, so that he cannot be surmounted or analyzed, and each of these three has the power of the others latent in him and his own, patent.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The faith that stands on authority is not faith. The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul. The position men have given to Jesus, now for many centuries of history, is a position of authority. It characterizes themselves.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“What is it we heartily wish of each other? Is it to be pleased and flattered? No, but to be convicted and exposed, to be shamed out of our nonsense of all kinds, and made men of, instead of ghosts and phantoms. We are weary of gliding ghostlike through the world, which is itself so slight and unreal. We crave a sense of reality, though it comes in strokes of pain.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you and you are he; then is a teaching, and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever quite lose the benefit.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Build therefore your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“By virtue of this inevitable nature, private will is overpowered, and, maugre our efforts or our imperfections, your genius will speak from you, and mine from me. That which we are, we shall teach, not voluntarily but involuntarily. Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened. Character teaches over our head. The infallible index of true progress is found in the tone the man takes. Neither his age, nor his breeding, nor company, nor books, nor actions, nor talents, nor all together can hinder him from being deferential to a higher spirit than his own. If he have not found his home in God, his manners, his forms of speech, the turn of his sentences, the build, shall I say, of all his opinions will involuntarily confess it, let him brave it out how he will. If we have found his centre, the Deity will shine through him, through all the disguises of ignorance, of ungenial temperament, of unfavorable circumstance.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A man’s power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth and his desire to communicate it without loss. The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires—the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise—and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation who for a short time believe and make others believe that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature. But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it is a man in alliance with truth and God. The moment our discourse rises above the ground line of familiar facts and is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that a material image more or less luminous arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence, good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation. It is the working of the Original Cause through the instruments he has already made.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Love is as much its demand as perception. Indeed, neither can be perfect without the other.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The stars have us to bed: Night draws the curtain; which the sun withdraws. Music”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and by the very knowledge of functions and processes to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole. The savant becomes unpoetic.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Life is comic or pitiful as soon as the high ends of being fade out of sight, and man becomes near-sighted, and can only attend to what addresses the senses.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We are all wise. The difference between persons is not in wisdom but in art. I knew, in an academical club, a person who always deferred to me; who, seeing my whim for writing, fancied that my experiences had somewhat superior; whilst I saw that his experiences were as good as mine. Give them to me and I would make the same use of them.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“This defining is philosophy. Philosophy is the account which the human mind gives to itself of the constitution of the world. Two cardinal facts lie forever at the base; the one, and the two.—1. Unity, or Identity; and, 2. Variety. We unite all things by perceiving the law which pervades them; by perceiving the superficial differences and the profound resemblances. But every mental act,—this very perception of identity or oneness, recognizes the difference of things. Oneness and otherness. It is impossible to speak or to think without embracing both.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“as there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we see and know, Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man ever got above, but they tower over us, and most in the moment when our interests tempt us to wound them.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Though we should soar into the heavens, though we should sink into the abyss, we never go out of ourselves; it is always our own thoughts that we perceive.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The idealist, in speaking of events, sees them as spirits.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new. Shall I not call God the beautiful, who daily showeth himself so to me in his gifts?”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“One class live to the utility of the symbol, esteeming health and wealth a final good. Another class live above this mark to the beauty of the symbol, as the poet and artist and the naturalist and man of science. A third class live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing signified; these are wise men.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The law of harmonic sounds reappears in the harmonic colors. The granite is differenced in its laws only by the more or less of heat from the river that wears it away. The river, as it flows, resembles the air that flows over it; the air resembles the light which traverses it with more subtile currents; the light resembles the heat which rides with it through Space. Each creature is only a modification of the other; the likeness in them is more than the difference, and their radical law is one and the same. A rule of one art, or a law of one organization, holds true throughout nature. So intimate is this Unity, that, it is easily seen, it lies under the undermost garment of Nature, and betrays its source in Universal Spirit. For it pervades Thought also. Every universal truth which we express in words, implies or supposes every other truth. Omne verum vero consonat. It is like a great circle on a sphere, comprising all possible circles; which, however, may be drawn and comprise it in like manner. Every such truth is the absolute Ens seen from one side. But it has innumerable sides.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Of course it needs the whole society to give the symmetry we seek. The parti-colored wheel must revolve very fast to appear white. Something is earned too by conversing with so much folly and defect. In fine, whoever loses, we are always of the gaining party. Divinity is behind our failures and follies also. The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man’s bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it. Like a bird which alights nowhere, but hops perpetually from bough to bough, is the Power which abides in no man and in no woman, but for a moment speaks from this one, and for another moment from that one.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The action of the soul is oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid than in that which is said in any conversation. It broods over every society, and they unconsciously seek for it in each other. We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more. I feel the same truth how often in my trivial conversation with my neighbors, that somewhat higher in each of us overlooks this by-play, and Jove nods to Jove from behind each of us.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each other’s hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We grizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson