Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are other measures of self-respect for a man, than the number of clean shirts he puts on every day.

That man is idle who can do something better.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Man is physical as well as metaphysical, a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

When it comes to divide an estate, the politest men quarrel.

Self reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.

A man's library is a sort of harem.

When it's dark enough men see stars.

The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts.

Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail.

We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe.

What is a farm but a mute gospel?

The earth laughs in flowers.

The angels are so enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.

It is only when mind and character slumber that the dress can be seen.

The only gift is a portion of thyself.... it is a cold, lifeless business, when you go to the shops to buy me something which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's.

There is no strong performance without a little fanaticism in the performer.

Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate...

Cities force growth, and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial.

The reputations of the nineteenth century will one day be quoted to prove its barbarism.

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that "the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow."

Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.

I honor health as the first muse, and sleep as the condition of health. Sleep benefits mainly by the sound health it produces; incidentally also by dreams, into whose farrago a divine lesson is sometimes slipped.