Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882): American philosopher. The library holds 1010 quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson, drawn from Essays: First Series, The Conduct of Life, Essays: Second Series and other works. The 60 below are the most quoted; search the library in the maker for the rest.
Often about: life, faith, nature, time, art, power
The best-known Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes
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Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Self-Reliance, Essays: First Series -
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
Circles, Essays: First Series -
The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.
Friendship, Essays: First Series -
A ruddy drop of manly blood The surging sea outweighs; The world uncertain comes and goes, The lover rooted stays.
Essays. First Series. Epigraph to Friendship -
Society is a troop of thinkers, and the best heads among them take the best places.
The Conduct of Life -
There is no beautifier of complexion or form or behavior like the wish to scatter joy, and not pain, around us.
The Conduct of Life -
A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give no peace.
Essays: First Series -
Thought is the property of him who can entertain it, and of him who can adequately place it.
Representative Men. Shakespeare -
Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.
Essays. First Series. Self-Reliance -
Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
Essays. First Series. History -
Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions.
Essays. First Series. Compensation -
Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.
Essays. First Series. History -
Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?
Representative Men. Montaigne -
Every action is measured by the depth of the sentiment from which it proceeds.
Essays. First Series. Spiritual Laws -
In the woods, we return to reason and faith.
Nature -
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn; and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.
Essays: First Series -
Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.
Essays: First Series -
Men of God have always, from time to time, walked among men, and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer.
Essays: First Series -
He is great who is what he is from Nature, and who never reminds us of others.
Representative Men. Uses of Great Men -
We do not count a man’s years until he has nothing else to count.
The Conduct of Life. Old Age -
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Self-Reliance, Essays: First Series -
A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature.
Essays. First Series. Friendship -
Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.
The Conduct of Life. Behaviour -
Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.
Letters and Social Aims. Social Aims -
So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can!
Voluntaries -
Fear not, then, thou child infirm; There’s no god dare wrong a worm.
Compensation -
For what are they all in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet?
Good Bye -
There is no great and no small To the Soul that maketh all; And where it cometh, all things are; And it cometh everywhere.
Essays. First Series. Epigraph to History -
To be great is to be misunderstood.
Essays. First Series. Self-Reliance -
The man who works at home helps society at large with somewhat more of certainty than he who devotes himself to charities.
Society and Solitude -
There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into a power, and organises a huge instrumentality of means.
Representative Men -
Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into a usage.
The Conduct of Life -
When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me,—when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more.
Essays: First Series -
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself; nothing, but the triumph of principles.
Essays: First Series -
The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man.
Essays: First Series -
Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.
Essays: First Series -
Courage, or the degree of life, is as the degree of circulation of the blood in the arteries.
The Conduct of Life -
Only that good profits which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.
Representative Men -
Scepticism is the attitude assumed by the student in relation to the particulars which society adores; but which he sees to be reverent only in their tendency and spirit.
Representative Men -
Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by originality.
Representative Men -
Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partisans, and the contention is ever hottest on minor matters.
Essays: Second Series -
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
Essays. First Series. Self-Reliance -
As all men have some access to primary truth, so all have some art or power of communication in the head, but only in the artist does it descend into the hand.
Essays: First Series -
The conscious utterance of thought by speech or action, to any end, is art.
Society and Solitude -
There is something not solid in the good that is done for us.
Representative Men -
It is proof of a high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.
The Conduct of Life -
Life is a sincerity. In lucid intervals we say, “Let there be an entrance opened for me into realities; I have worn the fool’s cap too long.”
Representative Men -
God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth.
The Conduct of Life. Society and Solitude -
There are faces so fluid with expression that we can hardly find what the mere features are.
The Conduct of Life -
The household is the home of the man as well as of the child.
Society and Solitude -
In a good lord there must first be a good animal, at least to the extent of yielding the incomparable advantage of animal spirits.
Essays: Second Series -
The head is a half, a fraction, until it is enlarged and inspired by the moral sentiments.
Society and Solitude -
Let a man believe in God, and not in names, places, and persons.
Essays: First Series -
If you criticise a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and instead of the poet, are censuring your own caricature of him.
Essays: Second Series -
So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man’s genius contracts itself to a very few hours.
Essays: Second Series -
The world is upheld by the veracity of good men; they make the earth wholesome.
Representative Men -
To educate the wise man, the State exists; and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires. The wise man is the State.
Essays: Second Series -
Some talkers excel in the precision with which they formulate their thoughts, so that you get from them somewhat to remember; others lay criticism asleep by a charm.
Society and Solitude -
Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world alters the world.
Essays: Second Series -
No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, the usages, and the arts of his times shall have no share.
Essays: First Series
Where these quotes come from
- Essays: First Series (220 quotes)
- The Conduct of Life (135 quotes)
- Essays: Second Series (101 quotes)
- Society and Solitude (83 quotes)
- Representative Men (65 quotes)
- Letters and Social Aims. Quotation and Originality (5 quotes)
- Essays. First Series. Self-Reliance (4 quotes)
- The Problem (4 quotes)
Every quote comes from a public-domain edition. How the library was made .