Top 500 Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

452. “Invention breeds invention.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

453. “When we have broken our god of tradition, and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with His presence.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

454. “My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

455. “Life is an ecstasy. Life is sweet as nitrous oxide.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

456. “Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

457. “To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same fields, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

458. “Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

459. “Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

460. “I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

461. “The philosophy of waiting is sustained by all the oracles of the universe.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

462. “Play out the game, act well your part, and if the gods have blundered, we will not.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

463. “Ability without honor has no value.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

464. “Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first. It rises in thought, to the end that it may be uttered and acted. Always in proportion to the depth of its sense does it knock importunately at the gates of the soul, to be spoken, to be done.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

465. “Greatness is a property for which no man can receive credit too soon; it must be possessed long before it is acknowledged.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

466. “A great teacher makes hard things easy.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

467. “Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

468. “The house praises the carpenter.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

469. “All natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

470. “Our prejudices are our robbers, they rob us valuable things in life. People only see what they are prepared to see.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

471. “Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

472. “Whoever fights, whoever falls, Justice conquers evermore.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

473. “It does not to dwell on dreams and forget to live, but it is equally foolish to ignore the past – never forget.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

474. “The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

475. “The Soul rules over matter. Matter may pass away like a mote in the sunbeam, may be absorbed into the immensity of God, as a mistis absorbed into the heat of the Sun – but the soul is the kingdom of God, the abode of love, of truth, of virtue.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

476. “Literature is eavesdropping.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

477. “There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept or if you have slept or if you have head ache or sciatica or leprosy or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace and not pollute the morning.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

478. “Rings and jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only true gift is a portion of thyself.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

479. “Language is a city, to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

480. “Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

481. “There is a power in love to divine another’s destiny better than that other can, and by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task. What has friendship so signal as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue is in us?”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

482. “Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence. The literature of every nation bear me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for two hundred years.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

483. “Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

484. “The mass of men worry themselves into nameless graves while here and there a great unselfish soul forgets himself into immortality.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

485. “When I first open my eyes upon the morning meadows and look out upon the beautiful world, I thank God I am alive.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

486. “The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

487. “But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

488. “Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

489. “Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

490. “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.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

491. “Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations. The only sin is limitation. As soon as you once come up with a man’s limitations, it is all over with him.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

492. “If we walk in the woods, we must feed mosquitoes.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

493. “The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

494. “A man’s style is his mind’s voice. Wooden minds, wooden voices.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

495. “When a dog is chasing after you, whistle for him.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

496. “I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to seserve that you should.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

497. “Science surpasses the old miracles of mythology.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

498. “Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

499. “Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

500. “Europe extends to the Alleghenies; America lies beyond.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson