Transcendent Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson (Page 2 of 4)

Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man.

Nothing can be colder than his head, when the lightnings of his imagination are playing in the sky.

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser.

Perpetual modernism is the measure of merit in every work of art.

The multitude of the sick shall not make us deny the existence of health.

All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.

Miracle comes to the miraculous, not to the arithmetician.

Men wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not from their vices.

Prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness.

Everything in our world, even a drop of dew, is a microcosm of the universe.

It is very odd that Nature should be so unscrupulous. She is no saint.

The philosophy of waiting is sustained by all the oracles of the universe.

All great speakers were bad speakers at first.

Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by originality.

Every noble activity makes room for itself.

Obedience alone gives the right to command.

I am a part and parcel of God.

The world is plentiful with honey, but only the humble bee can collect it.

Grow angry slowly -- there's plenty of time.

Persecution readily knits friendship between its victims.

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

All promise outruns performance.

We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise.

The love of novels is the preference of sentiment to the senses.

The eye of prudence may never shut.

Never self-possessed, or prudent, love is all abandonment.

Things refuse to be mismanaged for long.

It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.

The riddle of the age has for each a private solution.

Rectitude is a perpetual victory, celebrated not by cries of joy but by serenity, which is joy fixed or habitual.

In the sublimest flights of the soul, rectitude is never surmounted, love is never outgrown.

The restraining grace of common sense is the mark of all valid minds.

Every reform was once a private opinion.

Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?

My joy in friends, those sacred people, is my consolation.

O friend, never strike sail to a fear!

The sanity of society is a balance of a thousand insanity's.

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible.

He that despiseth small things will perish by little and little.

God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and religions.

A weed is a plant whose virtue is not yet known.

The virtues of society are the vices of the saints.

You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud, and fruit.

Out of sleeping a waking, Out of waking a sleep.

To make knowledge valuable, you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom.

Success to the strongest, who are always, at last, the wisest and best.

Give me truths for I am weary of the surfaces.

Conversation is the laboratory and workshop of the student.

Not a ray is dimmed, not an atom worn; nature's oldest force is as good as new.

In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of a man's own worthiness from other men.

Within, I do not find wrinkles and used heart, but unspent youth.

What you persist in doing gets easier. The task hasn't changed, but your ability to do it has increased.

The affirmative of affirmatives... is love.

Language is the archives of history.

A strenuous soul hates cheap success.

My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine.

The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.

We are of different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth.

The height of the pinnacle is determined by the breadth of the base.

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us and not done by us.

One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.

Private, accidental, confidential conversation breeds thought. Clubs produce oftener words.

Every man is eloquent once in his life.

The present is an edifice which God cannot rebuild.

I pay the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys that educate my son.

We must be courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.

The quality of the thought differences the Egyptian and the Roman, the Austrian and the American.

Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.

The force of character is cumulative.

Pain, indolence, sterility, endless ennui have also their lesson for you, if you are great.

Fear God, and where you go men shall think they walk in hallowed cathedrals.

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.

There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth; it is the beginning of wisdom.

Add energy, inspire hope, and blow the coals into a useful flame.

No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains.

A man often pays dear for a small frugality.

Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol and an audience is electrified.

Good nature is stronger than tomahawks.

Most of the great results of history are brought about by discreditable means.

As a man thinketh, so is he, and as a man chooseth, so is he.

Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion?

The experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet.

Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind.

Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions, has the richest return of wisdom.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst...They are for nothing but to inspire.

The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God.

Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

Never miss an opportunity of noticing anything of beauty .

Let not the author eat up the man, so that he shall be all balcony and no house.

It is one soul which animates all men.

What is there of the divine in a load of brick? What ... in a barber shop? ... Much. All.

Slavery is an institution for converting men into monkeys.

Every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor.

Men who know the same things are not long the best company for each other.

Our best history is still poetry.

Let us not forget the genial miraculous force we have known to proceed from a book.

Blessed are those who have no talent!

The cannon will not suffer any other sound to be heard for miles and for years around it.

Half a man's wisdom goes with his courage.

Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.

What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour?

Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.

Must we always talk for victory, and never once for truth, for comfort, and joy?

The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues.

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching.

An artist spends himself like the crayon in his hand, till he is all gone.

Do not craze yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere.

People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.

Don't ever give up on something or someone that you can't go a full day without thinking about.

In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout, and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep.

Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.

Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might.

There is no one who does not exaggerate!

The chief value of the new fact is to enhance the great and constant fact of life.

How much finer things are in composition than alone.

The foolish man wonders at the unusual, but the wise man at the usual.

Society always consists in the greatest part, of young and foolish persons.

A forte always makes a foible.

Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.

Give me insight into today and you may have the antique and future worlds.

Good thoughts are no better than good dreams if you don't follow through.

The good rain, like a bad preacher, does not know when to leave off.

The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings.

The true doctrine of omnipresence is, that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb.

For beauty is God's handwriting... And, thank God for it as a cup of His blessing.

Know then, that the world exists for you.

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue.

You need not fear to handle the truth roughly. She is no invalid.

Fame is proof that people are gullible.

Every man who would do anything well, must come to it from a higher ground.

With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the muses sing.

The disease with which the human mind now labors is want of faith.

Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig.

A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.

The whole value of the dime is in knowing what to do with it.

The reason why all men honor love is because it looks up, and not down; aspires and not despairs.

All substances the cunning chemist Time
Melts down into that liquor of my life.

Nature encourages no looseness; pardons no errors.

All life is an experiment.

I always seem to suffer some loss of faith on entering cities.

Moderation in all things, especially moderation.

Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy.

Great thoughts ensure musical expression.

Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word.

There is properly no history, only biography.

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.

He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist.

Other world? There is no other world; here or nowhere is the whole fact.

You must hear the birds song without attempting to render it into nouns and verbs.

No society can ever be so large as one man.

The soul circumscribes all things.

An orator or author is never successful till he has learned to make his words smaller than his ideas.

Insist on yourself. Never imitate.

The ornaments of our homes are the friends that visit it.

Progress is the activity of today and the assurance of tomorrow.

You have a place to live in this world which no other man can occupy; hence no competitors.

The pest of society is egotists.

In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil.

Philanthropies and charities have a certain air of quackery.

Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man.

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

The soul knows only the soul; the web of events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed.

Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

The ship of heaven guides itself and will not accept a wooden rudder.

Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour and is not reminded of the flux of all things?

The creation of beauty is art.

In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended.

If you are wise, you will dread a prosperity which only loads you with more.

Speech is better than silence; silence is better than speech.

Skepticism? Yes, but a saint is a skeptic once in twenty-four hours.

A man is a hero, not because he is braver than anyone else, but because he is brave for ten minutes longer.

Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's opinions.

Tragedy is in the eye of the observer, and not in the heart of the sufferer.

The key to every man is his thought.

There is hope in extravagance, there is none in routine.

The person who can make hard things easy is the educator.

The only true gifts are a portion of yourself.

The rain has spoiled the farmer's day;
Shall sorrow put my books away?
Thereby are two days lost.

The influence of fine scenery, the presence of mountains, appeases our irritations and elevates our friendships.

We want but two or three friends, but these we cannot do without, and they serve us in every thought we think.

There are always two parties; the establishment and the movement.

There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right.

Great conversation ... requires an absolute running of two souls into one.

We sell the thrones of angels for a short and turbulent pleasure.

When believers and unbelievers live in the same manner -- I distrust the religion.

Under every deep a lower deep opens.

Our prejudices are our robbers, they rob us valuable things in life. People only see what they are prepared to see.

We have more than we use.

A walk in the woods is only an exalted dream.

You see, it's all clear, we were meant to be here from the beginning.

Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread.

For nonconformity the world will whip you with its displeasure.

Find the journey's end in every step.

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions.

In the vaunted works of Art, The master-stroke is Nature's part.

He who would be a great soul in the future, must be a great soul now.