Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fame is proof that people are gullible.

In the woods, we return to reason and faith.

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

People are to be taken in very small doses. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use...In God, every end is converted into a new means.

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.

Don't trust children with edge tools. Don't trust man, great God, with more power than he has until he has learned to use that little better. What a hell we should make of the world if we could do what we would!

We love flattery, even though we are not deceived by it, because it shows that we are of importance enough to be courted.

The man is the head of the house but the woman is the neck that turns the head.

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.

To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not?

But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream.

The soul is superior to its knowledge; wiser than any of its works.

There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.

Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.

My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me.

Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary.

Never miss an opportunity of noticing anything of beauty ...

A moody child and wildly wise Pursued the game with joyful eyes, Which chose, like meteors, their way, And rived the dark with private ray: They overleapt the horizon's edge, Searched with Apollo's privilege; Through man, and woman, and sea, and star, Saw the dance of nature forward far; Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times, Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes. Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us young, And always keep us so.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere.

What we fear of doing most is usually what we most need to do.

As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain sublime assurance of success, but as soon as honied words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.