Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men who for truth and honor's sake Stand fast and suffer long. Brave men who work while others sleep, Who dare while others fly... They build a nation's pillars deep And lift them to the sky.
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today.
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
We estimate the wisdom of nations by seeing what they did with their surplus capital.
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man's personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
Shall we judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely.
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
The betrothed and accepted lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden by her acceptance. She was heaven while he pursued her, but she cannot be heaven if she stoops to one such as he!
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
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?
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature,
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have seen manners that make a similar impression with personal beauty; that give the like exhilaration, and refine us like that; and, in memorable experiences, they are suddenly better than beauty, and make that superfluous and ugly. But they must be marked by fine perception, the acquaintance with real beauty. They must always show self-control: you shall not be facile, apologetic, or leaky, but king over your word; and every gesture and action shall indicate power at rest. Then they must be inspired by the good heart. There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us. 'Tis good to give a stranger a meal, or a night's lodging. 'Tis better to be hospitable to his good meaning and thought, and give courage to a companion. We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage, they form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows.
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
Shallow people believe in luck and in circumstances; Strong people believe in cause and effect.
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.
By Ralph Waldo Emerson