Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

If a man fasten his attention on a single aspect of truth and apply himself to that alone for a long time, the truth becomes distorted and not itself but falsehood.

Truth has already ceased to be itself if polemically said.

No rent-roll nor army-list can dignify skulking and dissimulation: and the first point of courtesy must always be truth, as really all the forms of good-breeding point that way.

Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better.

An individual is an encloser. Time and space, liberty and necessity, truth and thought, are left at large no longer.

Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of someone's mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers

The soul is the perceiver and the revealer of truth.

I covet truth; beauty is unripe childhood's cheat; I leave it behind with the games of youth.

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please you can never have both.

Dare to love God without mediator or veil.

I cannot marry the facts of William Shakespeare to his verse: Other men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man is in wide contrast.

Love is the bright foreigner, the foreign self.

In the sublimest flights of the soul, rectitude is never surmounted, love is never outgrown.

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.

Who you are speaks so loudly I can't hear what you're saying.

Getting old is a fascination thing. The older you get, the older you want to get.

Reality is a sliding door.

Great is paint; nay, God is the painter; and we rightly accuse the critic who destroys too many illusions. Society does not love its unmaskers.

A sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal powers, souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which can love us, and which we can love.

Society does not love its unmaskers.

Love should make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy. Our Sunday-schools, and churches, and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody.

The babe in arms is a channel through which the energies we call fate, love, and reason visibly stream.

Let us be poised, wise and our own today.