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.
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Every natural action is graceful.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

But if a man be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, t...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the prese...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travel...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poet To mask the fiery thought, in simple words succeeds. For still the craft of genius is, To mask a king in weeds

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Greatness is a property for which no man can receive credit too soon; it must be possessed long before it is acknowledged.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love what is simple and beautiful. These are the essentials.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I covet truth; beauty is unripe childhood's cheat; I leave it behind with the games of youth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. He is isolated among his contemporaries by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will ...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

No mountain is of any appreciable height to break the curve of the sphere.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a ve...

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