Transcendent Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

The Sun is the sole inconsumable fireAnd God is the sole inexhaustible Giver.

What is the hardest task in the world? To think.

Coolness and absence of heat and haste indicate fine qualities.

The new statement is always hated by the old, and, to those dwelling in the old, comes like an abyss of skepticism.

The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.

The hero is suffered to be himself.

It is with a good book as it is with good company.

Walking has the best value as gymnastics of the mind.

The household is a school of power. There, within the door, learn the tragi-comedy of human life.

Very idle is all curiosity concerning other people's estimate of us, and all fear of remaining unknown is not less so.

Every man is an impossibility until he is born.

The health of the eye demands a horizon.

Imitation cannot go above its model.

Hospitality consists in a little fire, a little food, and an immense quiet.

Universities are of course hostile to geniuses.

It makes no difference whether the appeal is to numbers or to one. The faith that stands on authority is not faith.

Works of the intellect are great only by comparison with each other.

If a man's eye is on the Eternal, his intellect will grow.

Everything intercepts us from ourselves.

The primary wisdom is intuition.

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.

The poisons are our principal medicines, which kill the disease and save the life.

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.

Each man has an aptitude born with him. Do your work.

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.

The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue.

A man often pays dear for a small frugality.