Essays Quotes

“Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First and Second Series

“To fill the hour,—that is happiness; to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First and Second Series

“There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh, all things are
And it cometh everywhere.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First and Second Series

“Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it, in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First and Second Series

“Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First and Second Series

“There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to consciousness. Every man supposed himself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel was never opened; there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzed. That is, every man believes that he has a greater possibility.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series and Second Series