Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

But when you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world.

The measure of mental health is the disposition to find good everywhere.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Todo barco es un objeto romántico hasta que nos embarcamos en él

as the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters. 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.

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable.

A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It

A man is fed, not that he may be fed, but that he may work.

Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day.

Rectitude is a perpetual victory, celebrated not by cries of joy but by serenity, which is joy fixed or habitual.

I see the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against my house, from day-break to sun-rise, with emotions which an angel might share

The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty. This

Each is liable to panic, which is, exactly, the terror of ignorance surrendered to the imagination.

No book has worth by itself, but by the relation to what you have from many other books, it weighs.

Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

Genius is religious.

I become the transparent eyeball...

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair.

What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all.

The love that you withhold is the pain you carry.

Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.

It is said to be the age of the first person singular

The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Nature hates monopolies and exceptions. The waves of the sea do not more speedily seek a level from their loftiest tossing, than the varieties of condition tend to equalize themselves. There is always some leveling circumstance that puts down the overbearing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate, substantially on the same ground with all others