Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men are what their mothers made them.

To describe adequately is the high power & one of the highest enjoyments of man. She was beautiful and he fell in love with her. The thing has happened to millions, yet how few can tell the story. Try some of them, set them at the painting; each knows it all & can communicate nothing. Then comes Shakspeare [sic], & tells it point for point as it befel [sic], or better; and now we have two things, love & literature.

All things are engaged in writing their history...Not a foot steps into the snow, or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. The ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints. In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal.

We ask for long life, but 'tis deep life, or grand moments, that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical.

A song is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. If the singer sings from a sense of duty or from seeing no way of escape, I had rather have none.

There is a difference between truly listening and waiting for your turn to talk.

We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint those qualities which we do not posses.

This relation between the mind and matter is not fancied by some poet, but stands in the will of God, and so is free to be known by all men.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

We fetch fire and water, run about all day among the shops and markets, and get our clothes and shoes made and mended, and are the victims of these details, and once in a fortnight we arrive perhaps at a rational moment.

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.

We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves'-neck lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things, which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at appropriation and use.

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

I shall pass this way but once; any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful. And the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath, like space and time, make all matter gay. Even the corpse has its own beauty.

A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought, he will regain his tongue.

Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover.

What you are afraid to do is a clear indication of what you need to do

The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative man.

Speech is power; speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel.

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight

You would compliment a coxcomb doing a good act, but you would not praise an angel.

We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.

There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time.