Top 10 Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees.

Every man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well. He has changed his market cart into a chariot of the sun.

There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue.

'Well,' said Red Jacket [to someone complaining that he had not enough time], 'I suppose you have all there is.'

And the glory of character is in affronting the horrors of depravity to draw thence new nobilities of power: as Art lives and thrills in new use and combining of contrasts, and mining into the dark evermore for blacker pits of night.

Every novel is a debtor to Homer.

I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the colle

In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.

As sunbeams stream through liberal space And nothing jostle or displace, So waved the pine-tree through my thought And fanned the dreams it never brought.

I think the vice of our housekeeping is that it does not hold man sacred. The vice of government, the vice of education, the viceof religion, is one with that of the private life.

Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line,Severing rightly his from thine,Which is human, which divine.

Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.

There are geniuses in trade as well as in war, or the state, or letters; and the reason why this or that man is fortunate is not to be told. It lies in the man: that is all anybody can tell you about it.

A great mind is a good sailor, as a great heart is.

Men are lenses through which we read our own minds.

Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.

A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist.

For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise.

The good rain, like a bad preacher, does not know when to leave off.

It is not what talents or genius a man has, but how he is to his talents, that constitutes friendship and character. The man thatstands by himself, the universe stands by him also.

Defect in manners is usually the defect of fine perceptions. Elegance comes of no breeding, but of birth.

Every man is an impossibility until he is born.

Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self.

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.

Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual.

I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.

Every man is the inlet and may become the outlet of all there is in God.

Everything is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour if seen as experience.

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