Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and virtue, will purge the eyes to understanding her text.

The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish, as well as the aerial proportions and perspective of vegetable beauty.

At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.

Presently we pass to some other object which rounds itself into a whole as did the first; for example, a well-laid garden; and nothing seems worth doing but the laying-out of gardens.

There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence

When I go into my garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.

The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

The greatest delight 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.

Time is indeed the theater and seat of illusions; nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century, and dwarfs an age to an hour.

The only true gift is a portion of yourself.

To laugh often and love much... to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to give one's self... this is to have succeeded.

Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as two sides of an algebraic equation.

Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.

Envy is the tax which all distinction must pay.

What torments of grief you endured, from evils that never arrived.

Come, see the north-wind's masonry, Out of an unseen quarry evermore Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer Curves his white bastions with projected roof Round every windward stake, or tree, or door. Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work So fanciful, so savage, naught cares he For number or proportion.

Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.

People are always getting ready to live but never living.

How cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew!

People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.