Quotes About Reflection

The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are.

Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.

The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

Thought is the property of those only who can entertain it. -

What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well half an hour?

Tomorrow, a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time.

I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker.

Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.

In the woods is perpetual youth. In the woods we return to faith and reason.

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

Life goes headlong. We chase some flying scheme, or we are hunted by some fear or command behind us. But if suddenly we encounter a friend, we pause; our heat and hurry look foolish enough; now pause, now possession, is required, and the power to swell the moment from the resources of the heart. The moment is all, in all noble relations.

I know too well how slowly we edge along sideways to every thing good & brilliant in our lives & how casually and unobservedly we make all our most valued acquaintances.

Life is our dictionary

In the woods, we return to reason and faith.

People are to be taken in very small doses. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

The soul is superior to its knowledge; wiser than any of its works.

Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary.

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds.

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. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

A mind might ponder its thought for ages, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach it in a day.