Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

The sea, washing the equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid, and the power and empire that follow it... ''Beware of me,'' it says, ''but if you can hold me, I am the key to all the lands.

Do the thing and you will have the power.

All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power, but the absence of power.

Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.

The Americans have no faith, they rely on the power of a dollar; they are deaf to sentiment.

Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands.

A new degree of intellectual power seems cheap at any price.

He only is a well-made man who has a good determination. And the end of culture is not to destroy this, God forbid! but to train away all impediment and mixture and leave nothing but pure power.

The maxim of courts is that manner is power.

The test of civilization is the power of drawing the most benefit out of cities.

You do not get power so that you can go out and do things, you go out and do things and you will get the power

Power obeys reality, and not appearances; power is according to quality, and not quantity.

Men seek to be great; they would have offices, wealth, power, and fame. They think that to be great is to possess one side of nature,--the sweet, without the other side,--the bitter.

Every natural power exhilarates; a true talent delights the possessor first.

Power educates the potentate.

Money often costs too much, and power and pleasure are not cheap.

The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant's economy is a coarse symbol of the soul's economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure.

Of immortality, the soul, when well employed, is incurious. It is so well, that it is sure that it will be well. It asks no questions of the Supreme Power.

There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself.

Since everything in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is that the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.

Power resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state.

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.