Top 4251 Quotes & Sayings by Ralph Waldo Emerson - Page 67

There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you, and you are he; then is a teaching; and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever lose the benefit.

I see it only that thyself is here, and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels and the supreme being shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest.

They think him the best dressed man, whose dress is so fit for his use that you cannot notice or remember to describe it.

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

All the world loves a lover.

If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.

A beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of fine arts.

A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: it was somebody's name, or he happened to be there at right time, or it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken.

Want is a growing giant whom the coat of have was never large enough to cover.

In the right hands, literature is not resorted to as a consolation, and by the broken and decayed, but as a decalogue.

The dice of God are always loaded.

Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.

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

Let us replace sentimentalism by realism and dare to uncover those simple and terrible laws which, be they seen or unseen, pervade and govern.

The true poem is the poet's mind.

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions.

The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.

The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it.

A collector recently bought at public auction, in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakespeare; but for nothing a school-boy can read Hamlet and can detect secrets of highest concernment yet unpublished therein.

There is no better way to exercise the imagination than the study of the law.

Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in.

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem.

We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.

The effects of opposition are wonderful. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing of a threat, men to whom a crisis, which intimidates and paralyzes the majority, comes as graceful and beloved as a bride!

The great man, that is, the man most imbued with the spirit of the time, is the impressionable man.

The first and last lesson of religion is, "The things that are seen, are temporal; the things that are unseen, are eternal." It puts an affront upon nature.

Science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or, the state of science is an index of our self-knowledge.

Life is not measured by its length, but by its depth.

We cannot let our angels go; we do not see that they only go out that archangels may come in.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. If two or three persons should come with a high spiritual aim and with great powers, the world would fall into their hands like a ripe peach.

We stand against fate, as children stand up against the wall in their father's house, and notch their height from year to year. But when the boy grows to a man, and is master of the house, he pulls down that wall and builds it new and bigger.

Intellect is void of affection and sees an object as it stands in the light of science, cool and disengaged. The intellect goes out of the individual, floats over its own personality, and regards it as a fact, and not as I and mine.

In science we have to consider two things: power and circumstance.

The idiot, the Indian, the child and unschooled farmer's boy stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.

Science finds it methods.

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

The sciences, even the best,-mathematics and astronomy,-are like sportsmen, who seize whatever prey offers, even without being able to make any use of it.

We can only be valued as we make ourselves valuable.

The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zoology, (those first steps which the farmer, the hunter, and the sailor take,) teach that nature's dice are always loaded; that in her heaps and rubbish are concealed sure and useful results.

We put our love where we have put our labor.

In failing circumstances no one can be relied on to keep their integrity.

As Arkwright and Whitney were the demi-gods of cotton, so prolific Time will yet bring an inventor to every plant. There is not a property in nature but a mind is born to seek and find it.

The Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and boys were now drilled in Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, it had quite left these shells high on the beach, and was creating and feeding other matters [science] at other ends of the world.

It is always so pleasant to be generous, though very vexatious to pay debts.

The book written against fame and learning has the author's name on the title-page.

Practice makes perfect - the sooner you start, the sooner you will be a happy nonsmoker

Give all to love: Obey thy heart; Friends, kindred, days, Estate, good fame, Plans, credit, and the Muse,- Nothing refuse.

He decided to give up his large ambition of knowledge and action for any narrow craft or profession, aiming at a much more comprehensive calling, the art of living.

Genius appeals to the future.

'Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth. Those laws do not stop where our eyes lose them, but push the same geometry and chemistry up into the invisible plane of social and rational life, so that, look where we will, in a boy's game, or in the strifes of races, a perfect reaction, a perpetual judgment keeps watch and ward.

In these divine pleasures permitted to me of walks in the June night under moon and stars, I can put my life as a fact before me and stand aloof from its honor and shame.

Science, Nature,-O, I've yearned to open some page.

If we must accept fate we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character.

Most people, who have quit smoking, have had at least one unsuccessful try in the past. It is not important how many times you try to quit. The only important thing is, that eventually you stay quit

Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations

Science corrects the old creeds, sweeps away, with every new perception, our infantile catechisms, and necessitates a faith commensurate with the grander orbits and universal laws which it discloses yet it does not surprise the moral sentiment that was older and awaited expectant these larger insights.

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.