Top 500 Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “There is always safety in valor.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

352. “Common sense is as rare as genius.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

353. “The highest revelation is that God is in every man.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

354. “A man’s library is a sort of harem.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

355. “Postpone not your life.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

356. “Be not the slave of your own past.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

357. “When duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

358. “To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch...”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

359. “It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterward return again.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

360. “Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the omnipresent God bursts through everywhere.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

361. “Go put your creed into your deed, Nor speak with double tongue.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

362. “Do what we can, summer will have its flies.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

363. “Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as two sides of an algebraic equation.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

364. “When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

365. “Hospitality consists in a little fire, a little food, and an immense quiet.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

366. “Machinery is aggressive. The weaver becomes a web, the machinist a machine. If you do not use the tools, they use you. All tools are in one sense edge-tools, and dangerous.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

367. “The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

368. “The crime which bankrupts men and nations is that of turning aside from one’s main purpose to serve a job here and there.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

369. “Every man is entitled to be valued by his best moment.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

370. “The height of the pinnacle is determined by the breadth of the base.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

371. “Every man’s nature is a sufficient advertisement to him of the character of his fellows.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

372. “For nonconformity the world will whip you with its displeasure.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

373. “Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

374. “Music and Wine are one.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

375. “We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend, so we buy ice cream.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

376. “Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

377. “Some of your griefs you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived, But what torments of grief you’ve endured From evils that never arrived.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

378. “The greatest delight the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me and I to them.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

379. “The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

380. “God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and religions.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

381. “Beware of what you want-for you will get it.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

383. “Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

384. “Build therefore your own world.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

385. “No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

386. “Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

387. “A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

388. “Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

389. “All successful men have agreed in one thing – they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

390. “I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

391. “The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

393. “A nation never falls but by suicide.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

394. “The primary wisdom is intuition.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

395. “As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

396. “If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

397. “I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hopethat it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

398. “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.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

399. “And, in fine, the ancient precept, “Know thyself,” and the modern precept, “Study nature,” become at last one maxim.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

400. “I wiped away the weeds and foam, I fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore, With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson