Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious.

A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision, his living is natural and poetic.

A garden is like those pernicious machineries which catch a man's coat-skirt or his hand, and draw in his arm, his leg , and his whole body to irresistible destruction.

The foolish man wonders at the unusual, but the wise man at the usual.

He only is a well-made man who has a good determination.

The world leaves no track in space, and the greatest action of man no mark in the vast idea.

The subject is said to have the property of making dull men eloquent.

It is not what talents or genius a man has, but how he is to his talents, that constitutes friendship and character. The man thatstands by himself, the universe stands by him also.

A man must thank his defects, and stand in some terror of his talents. A transcendent talent draws so largely on his forces as tolame him; a defect pays him revenues on the other side.

The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody.

Beauty brings its own fancy price, for all that a man hath will he give for his love.

We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men aboutus are dupes. But life is a sincerity.

The consciousness in each man is a sliding scale, which identifies him now with the First Cause, and now with the flesh of his body; life above life, in infinite degrees.

But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things.

All persons are puzzles until at last we find in some word or act the key to the man, to the woman; straightway all their past words and actions lie in light before us.

Man sheds grief as his skin sheds rain.

War, to sane men at the present day, begins to look like an epidemic insanity, breaking out here and there like the cholera or influenza, infecting men's brains instead of their bowels.

An individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen. He is strong, not to do, but to live; not in his arms, but in his heart; not as an agent, but as a fact.

Astrology is astronomy brought down to Earth and applied toward the affairs of men.

The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues.

Among the map makers of each generation are the risk takers, those who see the opportunities, seize the moment and expand man's vision of the future

Much of the wisdom of the world is not wisdom, and the most illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary fame, and are not writers.

The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self-trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do.

Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would starve.