Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

The human body is a magazine of inventions, the patent office, where are the models from which every hint is taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within.

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue.

The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.

The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but deliverance from fear

There is always safety in valor

The only thing grief as taught me is to know how shallow it is.

Great men are they who see that the spiritual is stronger than any material force.

There are some men above grief and some men below it.

Sorrow makes us children again.

Every sunset brings the promise of a new dawn.

Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members…. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist.

America is another name for opportunity. Our whole history appears like a last effort of divine providence on behalf of the human race.

I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat.

Cities force growth, and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial.

Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee, and do not try to make the universe a blind alley.

All the thoughts of a turtle are turtles, and of a rabbit, rabbits.

Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good.

Standing on the bare ground… all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend.

Nature says thou shalt keep the air, skate, swim, walk, ride, run. When you have worn out your shoes, the strength of the sole leather has passed into the fibre of your body. I measure your health by the number of shoes and hats and clothes you have worn out. He is the richest man who pays the largest debt to his shoemaker.

In good writing, words become one with things.