Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing external to you has any power over you.

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

The god of Victory is said to be one-handed, but Peace gives victory to both sides.

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

The peace of the man who has foresworn the use of the bullet seems to me not quite peace but a canting impotence.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matter compared to what lies within us.

The power which resides in man is new in nature and none but he knows what that is which he can do nor does he until he has tried.

Sitting back in the evening, stargazing and stroking your dog, is an infallible remedy.

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.

There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.

A man is a god in ruins.

Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it.

The astonishment of life is the absence of any appearances of reconciliation between the theory and the practice of life.

The philosophy of waiting is sustained by all the oracles of the universe.

Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,--at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories.

We live ruins amid ruins.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.

Every word was once a poem.

Only poetry inspires poetry.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?

Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.

The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.