“Life itself is ... a sleep within a sleep.”
“Ah, if the rich were rich as the poor fancy riches.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“Our statute is a currency which we stamp with our own portrait.”
Source: The Annotated Emerson
“Love is the bright foreigner, the foreign self.”
Source: Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
“No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love.”
Source: Essays and Lectures
“The lover is made happier by his love than the object of his affection.”
Source: The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage.”
Source: The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations
“The finest people marry the two sexes in their own person.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“There is health in table talk and nursery play. We must wear old shoes and have aunts and cousins.”
Source: The Heart of Emerson's Journals
“Why should we fear to be crushed by savage elements, we who are made up of the same elements?”
Source: The Annotated Emerson
“Speak the affirmative; emphasize your choice by utter ignoring of all that you reject.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“We are not free to use today, or to promise tomorrow, because we are already mortgaged to yesterday.”
Source: The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843-1871
“We read often with as much talent as we write.”
“It is one soul which animates all men.”
Source: Essays, lectures and orations
“Pain, indolence, sterility, endless ennui have also their lesson for you, if you are great.”
Source: The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Any work looks wonderful to me except the one which I can do.”
Source: The Journals
“God will have life to be real; we will be damned, but it shall be theatrical.”
Source: Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks: 1847-1848
“We all wish to be of importance in one way or another. The child coughs with might and main, since it has no other claim on the company.”
Source: Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume VII: 1838-1842
“Isolation must precede true society.”
Source: Ralph Waldo Emerson
“It is doubtless a vice to turn one's eyes inward too much, but I am my own comedy and tragedy.”
Source: Emerson in His Journals
“A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him.”
Source: Essays, lectures and orations
“Man sheds grief as his skin sheds rain.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“A forte always makes a foible.”
Source: The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1854-1861
“You can take better care of your secret than another can.”
Source: The Journals
“We resent all criticism which denies us anything that lies in our line of advance.”
Source: Essays, Orations and Lectures
“There are men whose language is strong and defying enough, yet their eyes and their actions ask leave of other men to live.”
Source: The Journals
“The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust.”
Source: Emerson's Essays: Top Essays
“You need not fear to handle the truth roughly. She is no invalid.”
“If a man fasten his attention on a single aspect of truth and apply himself to that alone for a long time, the truth becomes distorted and not itself but falsehood.”
Source: The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The cure for false theology is motherwit. Forget your books and traditions, and obey your moral perceptions at this hour.”
Source: The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations
“The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being.”
Source: Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume V: 1835-1838
“I do not wonder at a snowflake, a shell, a summer landscape, or the glory of the stars; but at the necessity of beauty under which the universe lies.”
Source: Nature - Conduct of Life
“The universe does not jest with us, but is in earnest.”
Source: Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson - Poetry and Imagination
“The order of things consents to virtue.”
Source: The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson
“It is an esoteric doctrine of society, that a little wickedness is good to make muscle; as if conscience were not good for hands and legs.”
Source: The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations
“A beautiful woman is a practical poet.”
Source: Essays and Lectures
“A woman's strength is the unresistible might of weakness.”
Source: The Journals
“War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“What is there of the divine in a load of brick? What ... in a barber shop? ... Much. All.”
Source: The Heart of Emerson's Journals
“The life of labor does not make men, but drudges.”
Source: Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1820-1872 [1876] Ed
“A poem, a sentence, causes us to see ourselves. I be, and I see my being, at the same time.”
Source: The Journals
“In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, and go as brave as the zodiac.”
Source: The Annotated Emerson
“Between cultivated minds the first interview is the best.”
Source: Emerson in His Journals
“Europe extends to the Alleghenies; America lies beyond.”
“Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
“By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.”
Source: Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume VIII: Letters and Social Aims
“How many attractions for us have our passing fellows in the streets, both male and female, which our ethics forbid us to express, which yet infuse so much pleasure into life. A lovely child, a handsome youth, a beautiful girl, a heroic man, a maternal woman, a venerable old man, charm us, though strangers, and we cannot say so, or look at them but for a moment.”
Source: A Year with Emerson: A Daybook
“A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will or against his will he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a threadball thrown at a mark, but the other end remains on the thrower”
Source: The Portable Emerson: New Edition
“Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed In a tumultuous privacy of storm.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)
