Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a crack in every thing God has made.

The negro has saved himself and the white man very patronizingly says, I have saved you.

Power is in nature the essential measure of right.

was a melancholy introvert who declined to join in philosophical discussions.)   The Concord circle of sympathetically-minded thinkers, writers, and social activists became known as Transcendentalists. What exactly is Transcendentalism? That's the question Emerson set out to answer at Boston's Masonic Temple in 1842. In addition to defining his own philosophy, this lecture planted the seeds of the modern self-help and personal development movements.

The scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge

As no man had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him, so no man had ever a defect that was not somewhere made useful to him. The stag in the fable admired his horns and blamed his feet, but when the hunter came, his feet saved him, and afterwards, caught in the thicket, his horns destroyed him.

the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground.

Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls.

I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.

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 their be any who understand it or not.

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experience.

Obedience alone gives the right to command.

No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love

You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him.

In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.

Self-sacrifice is the real miracle out of which all the reported miracles grow.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire.

Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding.

Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than material force, that thoughts rule the world.

Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is the triumph of enthusiasm.

Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.