Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

About Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face and behaviour of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to our purp...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think ...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. The...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the unive...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, ...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful ...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this rad...

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.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the remotest heaven; every chemical change from the rudest crystal up...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, -- he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate t...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Author Bio

  • NameRalph Waldo Emerson
  • DescriptionAmerican philosopher, essayist, and poet
  • BornMay 25, 1803
  • DiedApril 27, 1882
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPhilosopher; Poet; Writer; Essayist