Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better."

"The sky is the daily bread of the eyes."

"If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as "spiritual life," "God," "soul," "cross," etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent."

"Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock."

"It is easy to live for others; everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves."

"I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us."

"Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know."

"Blessed are those who have no talent!"

"The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan."

"I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods."

"The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution."

"All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle."

"The clergy are as like as peas."

"That which is best about conservatism, that which, though it cannot be expressed in detail, inspires reverence in all, is the Inevitable."

"Children are all foreigners."

"I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom."

"Always put the best interpretation on a tenet. Why not on Christianity, wholesome, sweet, and poetic? It is the record of a pure and holy soul, humble, absolutely disinterested, a trutn-speaker, and bent on serving, teaching, and uplifting men. Christianity taught the capacity, the element, to Jove the All-perfect without a stingy bargain for personal happiness. It taught that to love him was happiness,—to love him in other’s virtues."

"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."

"Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis."

"If the colleges were better, if they ... had the power of imparting valuable thought, creative principles, truths which become powers, thoughts which become talents, — if they could cause that a mind not profound should become profound, — we should all rush to their gates: instead of contriving inducements to draw students, you would need to set policy at the gates to keep order in the in-rushing multitude."

"You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear, that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. "What is this Truth you seek? What is this Beauty?" men will ask, with derision. If, nevertheless, God have called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say, "As others do, so will I. I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of the land, and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season." — then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men. The hour of that choice is the crisis of your history; and see that you hold yourself fast by the intellect. ... Bend to the persuasion which is flowing to you from every object in Nature, to be its tongue to the heart of man, and to show the besotted world how passing fair is wisdom."

"There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact."

"We are, like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox."

"We are always getting ready to live, but never living."

"Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact."

"Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous."

"Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see — not to eat, not for love, but only gliding."

"A man is a god in ruins."

"The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man."

"The soul is subject to dollars."

"In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking."

"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. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul."

"The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates."

"But genius looks forward: the eyes of men are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates."

"Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence."

"Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments."

"Character is higher than intellect...A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think."

"Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions, has the richest return of wisdom."

"Life is our dictionary."

"Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated."

"Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of the table."

"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; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; — show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the ledger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing; — and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench."

"Do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him."

"We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men."

"The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all."

"The man who renounces himself, comes to himself."

"The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself."

"In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God?"

"Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves."

"I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of "Leaves of Grass." I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging..."