Top 4251 Quotes & Sayings by Ralph Waldo Emerson - Page 2

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.

Men are what their mothers made them.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

God enters by a private door into every individual.

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.

The faith that stands on authority is not faith.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles.

Money often costs too much.

With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.

What we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.

A man in debt is so far a slave.

If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.

The highest revelation is that God is in every man.

Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

We acquire the strength we have overcome.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

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 him no peace.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.

Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.

Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.

We must be our own before we can be another's.

The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the 'Not Me,' that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, 'Nature.'

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.

Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.

Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

Nothing external to you has any power over you.