Ralph Waldo Emerson

The progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface differences. To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (25 May 1803 – 27 April 1882) was an American philosopher, essayist, and poet.

See also: Essays (Emerson)

Quotes

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

• He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.
  • The Method of Nature (1841)

• I fancy I need more than another to speak (rather than write), with such a formidable tendency to the lapidary style. I build my house of boulders.
  • Letter to Thomas Carlyle (30 October 1841)

• Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.
  • "Walter Savage Landor", from The Dial, xii (1841)

• Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.
  • "Walter Savage Landor", from The Dial, xii (1841)

• Self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God.
  • The Fugitive Slave Law, a lecture in NYC (March 7, 1854)

• Slavery is disheartening; but Nature is not so helpless but it can rid itself of every last wrong. But the spasms of nature are centuries and ages and will tax the faith of short-lived men. Slowly, slowly the Avenger comes, but comes surely. The proverbs of the nations affirm these delays, but affirm the arrival. They say, "God may consent, but not forever." The delay of the Divine Justice — this was the meaning and soul of the Greek Tragedy, — this was the soul of their religion.
  • The Fugitive Slave Law, a lecture in NYC (March 7, 1854)

• 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...
  • Letter to Walt Whitman, thanking him for a copy of Leaves of Grass (July 21, 1855)

• 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.
  • The Celebration of Intellect (1861)

• 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.
• The clergy are as like as peas.
  • "The Preacher", in The Index: A Weekly Paper (Feb. 5, 1880) pp. 62–3. Originally written as a parlor-lecture to some Divinity students, in 1867; afterwards enlarged from earlier writings, and read in its present form at the Divinity Chapel, Cambridge, MA, May 5, 1879

Only the great generalizations survive.

• Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as 'glittering generalities,' have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever.
  • From a lecture on Books given in the Fraternity Course in Boston in 1864; the quoted phrase 'glittering generalities' had been used by Rufus Choate to describe the declaration of the rights of man in the Preamble to the Constitution

• A mollusk is a cheap edition [of man] with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster-bank or among the seaweed.
  • Power and Laws of Thought (c. 1870)

• Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.
  • Parnassus (1874) Preface

• There are two classes of poets — the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.
  • Parnassus (1874) Preface

• What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have yet to be discovered.
  • Fortune of the Republic (1878)

• We are never without a pilot. When we know not how to steer, and dare not hoist a sail, we can drift. The current knows the way, though we do not. The ship of heaven guides itself, and will not accept a wooden rudder.
  • "The Sovereignty of Ethics", in The North America Review, no. 262 (May–June 1878) p. 407

Journals (1822–1863)

A man contains all that is needful to his government within himself. He is made a law unto himself.

• To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
  • December 20, 1822

• When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.
  • December 10, 1824

• The cup of life is not so shallow
  That we have drained the best
  That all the wine at once we swallow
  And lees make all the rest.
  • 1827

• There is a freemasonry among the dull by which they recognize and are sociable with the dull, as surely as a correspondent tact in men of genius.
  • 1827

• The Religion that is afraid of science dishonours God and commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it legislates, tyrannizes over a village of God's empires but is not the immutable universal law. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion and making way for truth.
  • March 4, 1831

• A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.
  • June 20, 1831

The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself. He is not to live the future as described to him but to live the real future to the real present. The highest revelation is that God is in every man.

• A man contains all that is needful to his government within himself. He is made a law unto himself. All real good or evil that can befal [sic] him must be from himself. He only can do himself any good or any harm. Nothing can be given to him or can taken from him but always there is a compensation.. There is a correspondence between the human soul and everything that exists in the world; more properly, everything that is known to man. Instead of studying things without the principles of them, all may be penetrated unto with him. Every act puts the agent in a new position. The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself. He is not to live the future as described to him but to live the real future to the real present. The highest revelation is that God is in every man.
  • September 8, 1833

• Everything intercepts us from ourselves.
  • 1833

• No man can have society upon his own terms. If he seeks it, he must serve it too.
  • 1833

• Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see — not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.
  • April 11, 1834

• We are always getting ready to live, but never living.
  • April 12, 1834

• Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.
  • 1836

• Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
  • November 8, 1838

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

• I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.
  • June 27, 1839

• Children are all foreigners.
  • September 25, 1839

• Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the state.
  • November 15, 1839

• He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is.
  • December 26, 1839

• The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence.
  • 1839

• How we hate this solemn Ego that accompanies the learned, like a double, wherever he goes.
  • 1839

• A good indignation brings out all one's powers.
  • 1841

• People say law but they mean wealth.
  • 1841

• People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.
  • 1841

• You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.
  • October 1842

• Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
  • November 11, 1842

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

• The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
  • May 25, 1843

• 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.
  • June 15, 1844

• Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock.
  • March 1845

• It is easy to live for others; everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.
  • May 3, 1845

• 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.
  • October 1, 1848

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

• Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.
  • May 1849

• Blessed are those who have no talent!
  • February 1850

• The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.
  • February 12, 1851; cf. the remark of John Wilkes about Samuel Johnson, "Liberty is as ridiculous in his mouth as Religion in mine" (20 March 1778), quoted in Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791)

• 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.
  • February 1855

• The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution.
  • July 1855

• All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle.
  • 1855

• The book written against fame and learning has the author's name on the title-page.
  • 1857

• I have been writing & speaking what were once called novelties, for twenty five or thirty years, & have not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves. I delight in driving them from me. What could I do, if they came to me? — they would interrupt and encumber me. This is my boast that I have no school & no follower. I should account it a measure of the impurity of insight, if it did not create independence.
  • April 1859

• The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.
  • 1859

• A nation never falls but by suicide.
  • 1861

• You can take better care of your secret than another can.
  • 1863

Nature (1836)

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!

• Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generation beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe. Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?
  • Introduction

• Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.
  • Introduction

• If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
  • Nature

• 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. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.
  • Nature

• The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title. To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food.
  • Nature

• Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.
  • Nature

• Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.
  • Beauty

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

• Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.
  • Language

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

• A man is a god in ruins.
  • Prospects

The American Scholar (1837)

An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, MA, August 31, 1837

• 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.
  • par. 5

• The soul is subject to dollars.
  • par. 6

• 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.
  • pars. 7–8

• 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.
  • par. 15

• The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates.
  • par. 17

• But genius looks forward: the eyes of men are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.
  • par. 18

• Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence.
  • par. 19

• Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments.
  • par. 20

• Character is higher than intellect...A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.
  • par. 27

• Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions, has the richest return of wisdom.
  • par. 28

• Life is our dictionary.
  • par. 29

• 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.
  • par. 35

• Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of the table.
  • par. 37

• 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.
  • par. 40

• 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.
  • par. 43

• 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.
  • par. 43

• 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.
  • par. 48

Divinity College Address (1838)

An Address delivered before the senior class in Divinity College, Cambridge, MA, July 15, 1838

The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.

• The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.
  • p. 6

• The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself.
  • p. 14

• 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?
  • p. 18

• Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves.
  • p. 25

• None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed.
  • p. 25

• The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.
  • p. 26

Literary Ethics (1838)

Address to the Literary Societes of Dartmouth College (24 July 1838)

• 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.

• Explore, and explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatise yourself, nor accept another's dogmatism. Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread, and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men's possessions, in all men's affections, in art, in nature, and in hope.

• Thought is all light, and publishes itself to the universe. It will speak, though you were dumb, by its own miraculous organ. It will flow out of your actions, your manners, and your face. It will bring you friendships. It will impledge you to truth by the love and expectation of generous minds. By virtue of the laws of that Nature, which is one and perfect, it shall yield every sincere good that is in the soul, to the scholar beloved of earth and heaven.

The Conservative (1841)

A Lecture read at the Masonic Temple, Boston (9 December 1841) · Full text online at Bartleby

Whosoever hereafter shall name my name, shall not record a malefactor, but a benefactor in the earth. If there be power in good intention, in fidelity, and in toil, the north wind shall be purer, the stars in heaven shall glow with a kindlier beam, that I have lived. I am primarily engaged to myself to be a public servant of all the gods, to demonstrate to all men that there is intelligence and good will at the heart of things, and ever higher and yet higher leadings.

• The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made. This quarrel is the subject of civil history. The conservative party established the reverend hierarchies and monarchies of the most ancient world. The battle of patrician and plebeian, of parent state and colony, of old usage and accommodation to new facts, of the rich and the poor, reappears in all countries and times. The war rages not only in battle-fields, in national councils and ecclesiastical synods, but agitates every man's bosom with opposing advantages every hour. On rolls the old world meantime, and now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities.
  Such an irreconcilable antagonism of course must have a correspondent depth of seat in the human constitution. It is the opposition of Past and Future, of Memory and Hope, of the Understanding and the Reason. It is the primal antagonism, the appearance in trifles of the two poles of nature.

• It will never make any difference to a hero what the laws are. His greatness will shine and accomplish itself unto the end, whether they second him or not. If he have earned his bread by drudgery, and in the narrow and crooked ways which were all an evil law had left him, he will make it at least honorable by his expenditure. Of the past he will take no heed; for its wrongs he will not hold himself responsible: he will say, All the meanness of my progenitors shall not bereave me of the power to make this hour and company fair and fortunate. Whatsoever streams of power and commodity flow to me, shall of me acquire healing virtue, and become fountains of safety. Cannot I too descend a Redeemer into nature? Whosoever hereafter shall name my name, shall not record a malefactor, but a benefactor in the earth. If there be power in good intention, in fidelity, and in toil, the north wind shall be purer, the stars in heaven shall glow with a kindlier beam, that I have lived. I am primarily engaged to myself to be a public servant of all the gods, to demonstrate to all men that there is intelligence and good will at the heart of things, and ever higher and yet higher leadings. These are my engagements; how can your law further or hinder me in what I shall do to men? On the other hand, these dispositions establish their relations to me. Wherever there is worth, I shall be greeted. Wherever there are men, are the objects of my study and love. Sooner of later all men will be my friends, and will testify in all methods the energy of their regard. I cannot thank your law for my protection. I protect it. It is not in its power to protect me. It is my business to make myself revered. I depend on my honor, my labor, and my dispositions for my place in the affections of mankind, and not on any conventions or parchments of yours.

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

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

• The two parties which divide the State, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made ... Now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities ... Innovation is the salient energy; Conservatism the pause on the last movement.

  Via Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Cycles of American History (Houghton Mifflin, 1986) p. 23

The Young American (1844)

A lecture read before the Mercantile Library Association, Boston (7 February 1844)

• Gentlemen, there is a sublime and friendly Destiny by which the human race is guided, — the race never dying, the individual never spared, — to results affecting masses and ages. Men are narrow and selfish, but the Genius or Destiny is not narrow, but beneficent. It is not discovered in their calculated and voluntary activity, but in what befalls, with or without their design. Only what is inevitable interests us, and it turns out that love and good are inevitable, and in the course of things. That Genius has infused itself into nature. It indicates itself by a small excess of good, a small balance in brute facts always favorable to the side of reason.

• Our condition is like that of the poor wolves: if one of the flock wound himself, or so much as limp, the rest eat him up incontinently. That serene Power interposes the check upon the caprices and officiousness of our wills.

• It is easy to see that the existing generation are conspiring with a beneficence, which, in its working for coming generations, sacrifices the passing one, which infatuates the most selfish men to act against their private interest for the public welfare. We build railroads, we know not for what or for whom; but one thing is certain, that we who build will receive the very smallest share of benefit. Benefit will accrue; they are essential to the country, but that will be felt not until we are no longer countrymen. We do the like in all matters: —
  'Man's heart the Almighty to the Future set
  By secret and inviolable springs.'

• We plant trees, we build stone houses, we redeem the waste, we make prospective laws, we found colleges and hospitals, for remote generations.

• This is the value of the Communities; not what they have done, but the revolution which they indicate as on the way.

• We must have kings, and we must have nobles. Nature provides such in every society, — only let us have the real instead of the titular. Let us have our leading and our inspiration from the best. In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise. Let the powers be well directed, directed by love, and they would everywhere be greeted with joy and honor.

• I call upon you, young men, to obey your heart, and be the nobility of this land. In every age of the world, there has been a leading nation, one of a more generous sentiment, whose eminent citizens were willing to stand for the interests of general justice and humanity, at the risk of being called, by the men of the moment, chimerical and fantastic. Which should be that nation but these States? Which should lead that movement, if not New England? Who should lead the leaders, but the Young American?

Poems (1847)

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare,
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

• Each the herald is who wrote
  His rank, and quartered his own coat.
  There is no king nor sovereign state
  That can fix a hero's rate.
  • Astræa

• I saw men go up and down,
  In the country and the town,
  With this tablet on their neck,—
  'Judgement and a judge we seek.'
  Not to monarchs they repair,
  Nor to learned jurist's chair;
  But they hurry to their peers,
  To their kinsfolk and their dears;
  Louder than with speech they pray,—
  'What am I? companion, say.'
  • Astræa

• Each to each a looking-glass,
  Reflects his figure that doth pass.
  Every wayfarer he meets
  What himself declared repeats,
  What himself confessed records,
  Sentences him in his words;
  The form is his own corporal form,
  And his thought the penal worm.
  Yet shine forever virgin minds,
  Loved by stars and the purest winds,
  Which, o'er passion throned sedate,
  Have not hazarded their state;
  Disconcert the searching spy,
  Rendering to a curious eye
  The durance of a granite ledge
  To those who gaze from the sea's edge.
  It is there for benefit;
  It is there for purging light;
  There for purifying storms;
  And its depths reflect all forms;
  It cannot parley with the mean,—
  Pure by impure is not seen.
  For there's no sequestered grot,
  Lone mountain tarn, or isle forgot,
  But Justice, journeying in the sphere,
  Daily stoops to harbour there.
  • Astræa

• Good bye, proud world! I'm going home;
  Thou art not my friend; I am not thine.
  • Good-bye, st. 1

• For what are they all in their high conceit,
  When man in the bush with God may meet?
  • Good-bye, st. 4

• Nor knowest thou what argument
  Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent:
  All are needed by each one,
  Nothing is fair or good alone.
  • Each and All, st. 1

• I wiped away the weeds and foam,
  And 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.
  • Each and All, st. 3

• 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 farm-house at the garden's end.
  • The Snow-Storm

• And when his hours are numbered, and the world
  Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
  Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
  To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone
  Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
  The frolic architecture of the snow.
  • The Snow-Storm

• Life is too short to waste
  The critic bite or cynic bark,
  Quarrel, or reprimand;
  'Twill soon be dark;
  Up! mind thine own aim, and
  God speed the mark!
  • To J. W., st. 4

• For there's no rood has not a star above it;
  The cordial quality of pear or plum
  Ascends as gladly in a single tree,
  As in broad orchards resonant with bees;
  And every atom poises for itself,
  And for the whole.
  • Musketaquid, st. 5

• But all sorts of things and weather
  Must be taken in together
  To make up a year,
  And a sphere.
  • Fable

• Talents differ; all is well and wisely put;
  If I cannot carry forests on my back,
  Neither can you crack a nut.
  • Fable

• Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
  This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
  Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
  Then beauty is its own excuse for Being.
  • The Rhodora

• Go where he will, the wise man is at home,
  His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome.
  • Wood-notes, st. 3

• Whoso walketh in solitude,
  And inhabiteth the wood,
  Choosing light, wave, rock, and bird,
  Before the money-loving herd,
  Into that forester shall pass
  From these companions power and grace.
  • Wood-notes, no. II, st. 4

• For nature beats in perfect tune,
  And rounds with rhyme her every rune,
  Whether she work in land or sea,
  Or hide underground her alchemy.
  Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
  Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
  But it carves the bow of beauty there,
  And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.
  • Wood-notes, no. II, st. 7

• The horseman serves the horse,
  The neatherd serves the neat,
  The merchant serves the purse,
  The eater serves his meat;
  'Tis the day of the chattel,
  Web to weave, and corn to grind;
  Things are in the saddle,
  And ride mankind.
  • Ode: Inscribed to W. H. Channing, st. 7

• There are two laws discrete
  Not reconciled,
  Law for man, and law for thing.
  • Ode: Inscribed to W. H. Channing, st. 9

• Olympian bards who sung
  Divine ideas below,
  Which always find us young
  And always keep us so.
  • Ode to Beauty, st. 2

• Give all to love;
  Obey thy heart;
  Friends, kindred, days,
  Estate, good fame,
  Plans, credit, and the muse;
  Nothing refuse.
  • Give All to Love, st. 1

• Though thou loved her as thyself,
  As a self of purer clay,
  Tho' her parting dims the day,
  Stealing grace from all alive,
  Heartily know,
  When half-gods go,
  The gods arrive.
  • Give All to Love, st. 4

• But these young scholars who invade our hills,
  Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,
  And travelling often in the cut he makes,
  Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
  And all their botany is Latin names.
  • Blight, st. 2

• The silent organ loudest chants
  The master's requiem.
  • Dirge, st. 13

• By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
  Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
  Here once the embattled farmers stood,
  And fired the shot heard round the world.
  The foe long since in silence slept;
  Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
  And Time the ruined bridge has swept
  Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
  On this green bank, by this soft stream,
  We set to-day a votive stone;
  That memory may their deed redeem,
  When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
  Spirit, that made those heroes dare,
  To die, and leave their children free,
  Bid Time and Nature gently spare
  The shaft we raise to them and thee.
  • Concord Hymn (1837)

• Hast thou named all the birds without a gun;
  Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk.
  • Forbearance

• Earth laughs in flowers to see her boastful boys
  Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs;
  Who steer the plough, but can not steer their feet
  Clear of the grave.
  • Hamatreya

• Pass in, pass in, the angels say,
  In to the upper doors;
  Nor count compartments of the floors,
  But mount to Paradise
  By the stairway of surprise.
  • Merlin, I, st. 2

• Thou animated torrid-zone.
  • To the Humble Bee, st. 1

• Seeing only what is fair,
  Sipping only what is sweet,
  Thou dost mock at fate and care.
  • To the Humble Bee, st. 6

• I like a church, I like a cowl,
  I love a prophet of the soul,
  And on my heart monastic aisles
  Fall like sweet strains or pensive smiles;
  Yet not for all his faith can see,
  Would I that cowled churchman be.
  Why should the vest on him allure,
  Which I could not on me endure?
  • The Problem, st. 1

• Not from a vain or shallow thought
  His awful Jove young Phidias brought.
  • The Problem, st. 2

• Out from the heart of Nature rolled
  The burdens of the Bible old.
  • The Problem, st. 2

• The hand that rounded Peter's dome,
  And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,
  Wrought in a sad sincerity,
  Himself from God he could not free;
  He builded better than he knew,
  The conscious stone to beauty grew.
  • The Problem, st. 2

• Earth proudly wears the Parthenon
  As the best gem upon her zone.
  • The Problem, st. 3

Representative Men (1850)

• The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome.
  • Uses of Great Men

• He is great who is what he is from Nature, and who never reminds us of others.
  • Uses of Great Men

• When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field the next man will appear.
  • Uses of Great Men

• Every hero becomes a bore at last.
  • Uses of Great Men

• It costs a beautiful person no exertion to paint her image on our eyes; yet how splendid is that benefit! It costs no more for a wise soul to convey his quality to other men.
  • Uses of Great Men

• Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
  • Plato; or, The Philosopher

• Things added to things, as statistics, civil history, are inventories. Things used as language are inexhaustibly attractive.
  • Plato; or, The Philosopher

• Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.
  • Montaigne; or, The Skeptic

• Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?
  • Montaigne; or, The Skeptic

• Thought is the property of him who can entertain it, and of him who can adequately place it.
  • Shakespeare; or, The Poet

• What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, or function, or district of man's work, has he not remembered? What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?
  • Shakespeare; or, The Poet

• Act, if you like,—but you do it at your peril. Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action. What they have done commits and enforces them to do the same again. The first act, which was to be an experiment, becomes a sacrament. The fiery reformer embodies his aspiration in some rite or covenant, and he and his friends cleave to the form, and lose the aspiration. The Quaker has established Quakerism, the Shaker has established his monastery and his dance; and, although each prates of spirit, there is no spirit, but repetition, which is anti-spiritual.
  • Goethe; or, the Writer

• In actions of enthusiasm, this drawback appears: but in those lower activities, which have no higher aim than to make us more comfortable and more cowardly, in actions of cunning, actions that steal and lie, actions that divorce the speculative from the practical faculty, and put a ban on reason and sentiment, there is nothing else but drawback and negation.
  • Goethe; or, The Writer

• The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstance.
  • Goethe; or, The Writer

• How can he [today's writer] be honored, when he does not honor himself; when he loses himself in the crowd; when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public.
  • Goethe; or, The Writer

English Traits (1856)

• The thing done avails, and not what is said about it. An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures.
  • First Visit to England

• Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig.
  • Voyage to England

• The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue.
  • Race

• Solvency is maintained by means of the national debt, on the principle, "If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?"
  • Ability

• I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes. They have in themselves what they value in their horses, — mettle and bottom.
  • Manners

• A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence.
  • Aristocracy

The Conduct of Life (1860)

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

• You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.
  • Fate

• Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.
  • Fate

• Men are what their mothers made them.
  • Fate

• Whatever limits us we call Fate.
  • Fate

• In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin, — seven or eight ancestors at least, — and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.
  • Fate

• Nature magically suits the man to his fortunes, by making these the fruit of his character.
  • Fate

• That what we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.
  • Fate

• All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.
  • Power

• As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues.
  • Power

• We may well call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself withersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.
  • Wealth

• Wealth begins in a tight roof that keeps the rain and wind out; in a good pump that yields you plenty of sweet water; in two suits of clothes, so to change your dress when you are wet; in dry sticks to burn; in a good double-wick lamp; and three meals; in a horse, or a locomotive, to cross the land; in a boat to cross the sea; in tools to work with; in books to read; and so, in giving, on all sides, by tolls and auxiliaries, the greatest possible extension to our powers, as if it added feet, and hands, and eyes, and blood, length to the day, and knowledge, and good-will.
  Wealth begins with these articles of necessity.
  • Wealth

• The world is his, who has money to go over it.
  • Wealth

• Art is a jealous mistress.
  • Wealth

• If a man own land, the land owns him.
  • Wealth

• Money often costs too much.
  • Wealth

• The manly part is to do with might and main what you can do.
  • Wealth

• You can never do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.
  • Culture

• I have been quoted as saying captious things about travel; but I mean to do justice. I think, there is a restlessness in our people, which argues want of character. All educated Americans, first or last, go to Europe; — perhaps, because it is their mental home, as the invalid habits of this country might suggest. An eminent teacher of girls said, "the idea of a girl's education, is, whatever qualifies them for going to Europe." Can we never extract this tape-worm of Europe from the brain of our countrymen?
  • Culture

• Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend.
  • Culture

• I am not much an advocate for travelling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home? I have been quoted as saying captious things about travel; but I mean to do justice. .... He that does not fill a place at home, cannot abroad. He only goes there to hide his insignificance in a larger crowd. You do not think you will find anything there which you have not seen at home? The stuff of all countries is just the same. Do you suppose there is any country where they do not scald milk-pans, and swaddle the infants, and burn the brushwood, and broil the fish? What is true anywhere is true everywhere. And let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.
  • Culture,

• The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.
  • Culture

• The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.
  • Worship

• We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.
  • Worship

• The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
  • Worship

• Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances...Strong men believe in cause and effect.
  • Worship

• People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.
  • Worship

• People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.
  • Worship

• I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.
  • Considerations by the Way

• Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.
  • Considerations by the Way

• Bad times have a scientific value. [...] We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea.
  • Considerations by the Way

• Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.
  • Considerations by the Way

• Our chief want in life, is somebody who shall make us do what we can.
  • Considerations by the Way

• Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.
  • Considerations by the Way

• Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. 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.
  • Considerations by the Way

• Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better.
  • Considerations by the Way

• Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.
  • Beauty

• Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.
  • Beauty

• If I could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in it, the beauty forsakes all the near water. For the imagination and senses cannot be gratified at the same time.
  • Beauty

• All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.
  • Illusions

• Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.
  • Illusions

• I find men victims of illusion in all parts of life. Children, youths, adults, and old men, all are led by one bawble or another. Yoganidra, the goddess of illusion, Proteus, or Momus, or Gylfi's Mocking, — for the Power has many names, — is stronger than the Titans, stronger than Apollo.
  • Illusions

• There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, — now repeated and hardened into usage. They form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned.
  • Behavior

• Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others, and this is a gift interred only by the self.
  • Behavior

• The highest compact we can make with our fellow, is, — "Let there be truth between us two forevermore".
  • Behavior

• 'Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.
  • Behavior

• The alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity in beasts, is a power behind the eye.
  • Behavior

• Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.
  • Behavior

Life and Letters in New England (1867)

"Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England" (1867), published in The Atlantic Monthly (October 1883)

• There are always two parties, the party of the Past and the party of the Future: the Establishment and the Movement. At times the resistance is reanimated, the schism runs under the world and appears in Literature, Philosophy, Church, State and social customs.
  • p. 529, col. 1

• The key to the period appeared to be that the mind had become aware of itself. Men grew reflective and intellectual. There was a new consciousness. The former generations acted under the belief that a shining social prosperity was the beatitude of man, and sacrificed uniformly the citizen to the State. The modern mind believed that the nation existed for the individual, for the guardianship and education of every man. This idea, roughly written in revolutions and national movements, in the mind of the philosopher had far more precision; the individual is the world.
  This perception is a sword such as was never drawn before. It divides and detaches bone and marrow, soul and body, yea, almost the man from himself. It is the age of severance, of dissociation, of freedom, of analysis, of detachment. Every man for himself. The public speaker disclaims speaking for any other; he answers only for himself. The social sentiments are weak; the sentiment of patriotism is weak; veneration is low; the natural affections feebler than they were. People grow philosophical about native land and parents and. relations. There is an universal resistance to ties rand ligaments once supposed essential to civil society. The new race is stiff, heady and rebellious; they are fanatics in freedom; they hate tolls, taxes, turnpikes, banks, hierarchies, governors, yea, almost laws. They have a neck of unspeakable tenderness; it winces at a hair. They rebel against theological as against political dogmas; against mediation, or saints, or any nobility in the unseen.
  The age tends to solitude. The association of the time is accidental and momentary and hypocritical, the detachment intrinsic and progressive. The association is for power, merely, — for means; the end being the enlargement and independency of the individual.
  • p. 529, col. 1

• The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives.
  • p. 530, col. 2

May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)

• God said, I am tired of kings,
  I suffer them no more;
  Up to my ear the morning brings
  The outrage of the poor.
  • Boston Hymn, st. 2

• To-day unbind the captive,
  So only are ye unbound;
  Lift up a people from the dust,
  Trump of their rescue, sound!
  • Boston Hymn, st. 17

• None shall rule but the humble,
  And none but Toil shall have.
  • Boston Hymn

• O tenderly the haughty day
  Fills his blue urn with fire;
  One morn is in the mighty heaven,
  And one in our desire.
  • Ode, st. 1

• United States! the ages plead, —
  Present and Past in under-song, —
  Go put your creed into your deed,
  Nor speak with double tongue.
  • Ode, st. 5

• I think no virtue goes with size;
  The reason of all cowardice
  Is, that men are overgrown,
  And, to be valiant, must come down
  To the titmouse dimension.
  • The Titmouse, st. 5

• So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
  So near is God to man,
  When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
  The youth replies, I can.
  • Voluntaries, st. 3

• England's genius filled all measure
  Of heart and soul, of strength and pleasure,
  Gave to the mind its emperor,
  And life was larger than before:
  Nor sequent centuries could hit
  Orbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit.
  The men who lived with him became
  Poets, for the air was fame.
  • Solution, ll. 35-42

• Nor mourn the unalterable Days
  That Genius goes and Folly stays.
  • In Memoriam E. B. E., st. 9

• Born for success he seemed,
  With grace to win, with heart to hold,
  With shining gifts that took all eyes.
  • In Memoriam E. B. E.

• Fear not, then, thou child infirm,
  There's no god dare wrong a worm.
  • Compensation, st. 2

• He thought it happier to be dead,
  To die for Beauty, than live for bread.
  • Beauty

• Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill?
  Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.
  • Fragment

• Deep in the man sits fast his fate
  To mould his fortunes, mean or great.
  • Fate

• For the prevision is allied
  Unto the thing so signified;
  Or say, the foresight that awaits
  Is the same Genius that creates.
  • Fate

• Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
  Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
  And marching single in an endless file,
  Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
  • Days

• It is time to be old,
  To take in sail: —
  The god of bounds,
  Who sets to seas a shore,
  Came to me in his fatal rounds,
  And said: 'No more!
  • Terminus

• Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.
  • Terminus

• Though love repine, and reason chafe,
  There came a voice without reply, —
  "'T is man's perdition to be safe
  When for the truth he ought to die."
  • Sacrifice

• If the red slayer think he slays,
  Or if the slain think he is slain,
  They know not well the subtle ways
  I keep, and pass, and turn again.
  • Brahma, st. 1
  • Composed in July 1856 this poem is derived from a major passage of the Bhagavad Gita, one of the most popular of Hindu scriptures, and portions of it were likely a paraphrase of an existing translation. Though titled "Brahma" its expressions are actually more indicative of the Hindu concept "Brahman"

• Far or forgot to me is near;
  Shadow and sunlight are the same;
  The vanished gods to me appear;
  And one to me are shame and fame.
  • Brahma, st. 2

• They reckon ill who leave me out;
  When me they fly, I am the wings;
  I am the doubter and the doubt;
  And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
  • Brahma, st. 3

• In the vaunted works of Art
  The master stroke is Nature's part.
  • Art

• Ever from one who comes to-morrow
  Men wait their good and truth to borrow.
  • Merlin's Song, II

• The music that can deepest reach,
  And cure all ill, is cordial speech.
  • Merlin's Song, II

• Some of your hurts you have cured,
  And the sharpest you still have survived,
  But what torments of grief you endured
  From evils which never arrived!
  • Borrowing From the French

• A ruddy drop of manly blood
  The surging sea outweighs,
  The world uncertain comes and goes;
  The lover rooted stays.
  • Friendship

• What potent blood hath modest May!
  • May-Day

• And striving to be man, the worm
  Mounts through all the spires of form.
  • May-Day

• And every man, in love or pride,
  Of his fate is ever wide.
  • Nemesis

• Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill?
  Pay every debt, as if God wrote the bill!
  • Quatrains, Suum Cuique

• Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die.
  • Quatrains, Nature

Society and Solitude (1870)

• God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth.
  • Society and Solitude

• We boil at different degrees.
  • Eloquence

• The best university that can be recommended to a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mobs.
  • Eloquence

• The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.
  • Domestic Life

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

• Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?
  • Works and Days

• A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.
  • Works and Days

• Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
  • Works and Days

• Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science.
  • Works and Days; sometimes misquoted as "Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science."

• A third illusion haunts us, that a long duration, as a year, a decade, a century, is valuable. But an old French sentence says, "God works in moments," — "En peu d'heure Dieu labeure." We ask for long life, but 't is deep life, or grand moments, that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical. Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance, — what ample borrowers of eternity they are! Life culminates and concentrates; and Homer said, "The Gods ever give to mortals their appointed share of reason only on one day."
  • Works and Days

• Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines.
  • Works and Days

• 'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear.
  • Success

• Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
  • Success

• We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.
  • Old Age

• There is no knowledge that is not power.
  • Old Age

• Hitch your wagon to a star.
  • Civilization

• The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
  • Civilization

• The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.
  • Civilization

• The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.
  • Civilization

• Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.
  • Art

• Nature paints the best part of a picture, carves the best parts of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and speaks the best part of the oration.
  • Art

• A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.
  • Art

• Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.
  • Art

• Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.
  • Books

• Nothing can be preserved that is not good.
  • Books

• Never read any book that is not a year old.
  • Books

• I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.
  • Books

• Never read any book that is not a year old.
  • Books

Letters and Social Aims (1876)

• Science does not know its debt to imagination.
  • Poetry and Imagination

• Alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.
  • Poetry and Imagination

• Music is the poor man's Parnassus.
  • Poetry and Imagination

• The imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man.
  • Poetry and Imagination

• Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.
  • Social Aims

• I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared "that the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow".
  • Social Aims

• Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.
  • Social Aims; sometimes condensed to "What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say."

• The law of the table is beauty, a respect to the common soul of the guests. Everything is unreasonable which is private to two or three, or any portion of the company. Tact never violates for a moment this law; never intrudes the orders of the house, the vices of the absent, or a tariff of expenses, or professional privacies; as we say, we never “talk shop” before company. Lovers abstain from caresses, and haters from insults, while they sit in one parlor with common friends.
  • Social Aims

• This world belongs to the energetic.
  • Resources

• Every really able man, in whatever direction he work,—a man of large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter,—if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be.
  • Immortality

• Every artist was first an amateur.
  • Progress of Culture

• Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. No hope so bright but is the beginning of its own fulfillment.
  • Progress of Culture Phi Beta Kappa Address (July 18, 1867)

• Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master at some point, and in that, I learn of him.
  • Greatness

• A good symbol is the best argument and is a missionary to persuade thousands.
  • Poetry and Imagination

• Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, and no force of character can make any stand against good wit.
  • The Comic

• The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible.
  • The Comic

• Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
  • Quotation and Originality

• In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.
  • Quotation and Originality

• Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody.
  • Quotation and Originality

• The heroic cannot be the common, nor can the common be heroic.
  • Quotation and Originality

• The gods sell anything to everybody at a fair price.
  • Quotation and Originality

• Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.
  • Quotation and Originality

• The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.
  • Quotation and Originality

• A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word just as good.
  • Quotation and Originality

• Genius borrows nobly. When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: "Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life."
  • Quotation and Originality

• By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.
  • Quotation and Originality

• Now shall we say that only the first men were well alive, and the existing generation is invalided and degenerate? ... A more subtle and severe criticism might suggest that some dislocation has befallen the race; that men are off their centre; that multitudes of men do not live with Nature, but behold it as exiles. People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in the world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority.
  • Quotation and Originality

• We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim. The Past is for us; but the sole terms on which it can become ours are its subordination to the Present. Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor. We must not tamper with the organic motion of the soul.
  • Quotation and Originality

• 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.
  • Quotation and Originality

• In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.
  • Quotation and Originality

Lectures and Biographical Sketches (1883)

• There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.
  • Demonology

• To live without duties is obscene.
  • Aristocracy

• There are men who astonish and delight, men who instruct and guide. Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better.
  • Character

• Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.
  • Education

• I see that sensible men and conscientious men all over the world were of one religion.
  • The Preacher

The Natural History of Intellect, and Other Papers (1893)

Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co.

What strength belongs to every plant and animal in nature. The tree or the brook has no duplicity, no pretentiousness, no show. It is, with all its might and main, what it is, and makes one and the same impression and effect at all times.

• Every man is a new method.
  • "The Natural History of Intellect", p. 28

• A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,— congestion of the brain, apoplexy, and strangulation.
  • "The Natural History of Intellect", p. 30

• Characters and talents are complemental and suppletory. The world stands by balanced antagonisms. The more the peculiarities are pressed the better the result. The air would rot without lightning; and without the violence of direction that men have, without bigots, without men of the fixed idea, no excitement, no efficiency.
  The novelist should not make any character act absurdly, but only absurdly as seen by others. For it is so in life. Nonsense will not keep its unreason if you come into the humorist's point of view, but unhappily we find it is fast becoming sense, and we must flee again into the distance if we would laugh.
  • "The Natural History of Intellect", p. 45

• What strength belongs to every plant and animal in nature. The tree or the brook has no duplicity, no pretentiousness, no show. It is, with all its might and main, what it is, and makes one and the same impression and effect at all times. All the thoughts of a turtle are turtles, and of a rabbit, rabbits. But a man is broken and dissipated by the giddiness of his will; he does not throw himself into his judgments; his genius leads him one way but 't is likely his trade or politics in quite another.
  • "The Natural History of Intellect", p. 46

• The poor, short lone fact dies at birth. Memory catches it up into her heaven and bathes it in immortal waters.
  • "Memory", p. 66

• The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.
  • "The Tragic", p. 217. From The Dial (April 1844) p. 515

Attributed

• So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine and so much in retrospect, that the amount of each person’s genius is confined to a very few hours.
  • Quoted in Simon Brown (ed.) The New England Farmer, vol. 9 (January 1857) p. 18

• I hung my verse in the wind
  Time and tide their faults will find.
  • "The Test", as quoted in Emerson As A Poet (1883) by Joel Benton, p. 40

• Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,
  Nor time unmake what poets know.
  • "The Test", as quoted in Emerson As A Poet (1883) by Joel Benton, p. 40

• Every man I meet is in some way my superior, and in that, I can learn of him.
  • As quoted in Think, Vol. 4-5 (1938), p. 32

• You must read Plato. But you must hold him at arm's length and say, 'Plato, you have delighted and edified mankind for two thousand years. What have you to say to me?'
  • Said to a young Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., as reported by Felix Frankfurter in Harlan Buddington Phillips, Felix Frankfurter Reminisces (1960), p. 59

• I read your piece on Plato. Holmes, when you strike at a king, you must kill him.
  • Said to a young Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who had written a piece critical of Plato in response to his earlier conversation with Emerson, as reported by Felix Frankfurter in Harlan Buddington Phillips, Felix Frankfurter Reminisces (1960), p. 59

• I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made the theological scheme of redemption absolutely incredible
  • Quoted in Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson, the Mind On Fire (Univ. of Calif Press 1995), p. 124

• What is there in 'Paradise Lost' to elevate and astonish like Herschel or Somerville?
  • Quoted in Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson, the Mind On Fire (Univ. of Calif Press 1995), p. 124

• It is sublime as night and a breathless ocean. It contains every religious sentiment, all the grand ethics, which visit in turn each noble poetic mind .... It is of no use to put away the book if I trust myself in the woods or in a boat upon the pond. Nature makes a Brahmin of me presently: eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken silence .... This is her creed. Peace, she saith to me, and purity and absolute abandonment - these panaceas expiate all sin and bring you to the beatitude of the Eight Gods.
  • Quoted in Nani Ardeshir Palkhivala, India's Priceless Heritage, 1st ed. (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1980) pp. 9-24

• Plato was synthesis of Europe and Asia, and a decidedly Oriental element pervades his philosophy, giving it a sunrise color.
  • Quoted in Swami Abhedananda, India and Her People, 6th ed. (Calcutta: Ramakrishna Vedanta Math, 1945)

• The Indian teaching, through its clouds of legends, has yet a simple and grand religion, like a queenly countenance seen through a rich veil. It teaches to speak truth, love others, and to dispose trifles. The East is grand - and makes Europe appear the land of trifles .... all is soul and the soul is Vishnu ... cheerful and noble is the genius of this cosmogony. Hari is always gentle and serene - he translates to heaven the hunter who has accidentally shot him in his human form, he pursues his sport with boors and milkmaids at the cow pens; all his games are benevolent and he enters into flesh to relieve the burdens of the world.
  • Quoted in S. Londhe, A Tribute to Hinduism (New Delhi: Pragun Publication, 2008)

• [The Upanishads and the Vedas] haunt me. In them I have found eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken peace.
  • Quoted in S. Londhe, A Tribute to Hinduism (2008)

• When Confucius and the Indian Scriptures were made known, no claim to monopoly of ethical wisdom could be thought of... It is only within this century [the 1800 's] that England and America discovered that their nursery tales were old German and Scandinavian stories; and now it appears that they came from India, and are therefore the property of all the nations.
  • Quoted in S. Londhe, A Tribute to Hinduism (2008)

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Quotes reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

• By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
  Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
  Here once the embattled farmers stood,
  And fired the shot heard round the world.
  • Hymn sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument

• For what avail the plough or sail,
  Or land or life, if freedom fail?
  • Boston

• If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. 6.
  • Nature, Addresses and Lectures. The American Scholar

• We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.
  • Old Age

• The virtues of society are the vices of the saints.
  • Circles

• The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.
  • Experience

• In skating over thin ice our safety is our speed.
  • Prudence

• Shallow men believe in luck.
  • Worship

• Heroism feels and never reasons and therefore is always right.
  • Heroism

• The faith that stands on authority is not faith.
  • The Over-soul

• God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose.
  • Intellect

• His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.
  • Greatness

• We boil at different degrees.
  • Eloquence

• Self-trust is the first secret of success.
  • Success

Pearls of Thought (1881)

Quotes reported in Maturin M. Ballou (ed.) Pearls of Thought (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1881)

• No congress, nor mob, nor guillotine, nor fire, nor all together, can avail, to cut out, burn, or destroy the offense of superiority in persons. The superiority in him is inferiority in me.
  • p. 65

• Never self-possessed, or prudent, love is all abandonment.
  • p. 158

• Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool. It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum. And here they will break out into their native music, and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns, and they mope and wallow like dogs!
  • p. 165

• I have seen manners that make a similar impression with personal beauty, that give the like exhilaration and refine us like that; and in memorable experiences they are suddenly better than beauty, and make that superfluous and ugly. But they must be marked by fine perception, the acquaintance with real beauty. They must always show control; you shall not be facile, apologetic, or leaky, but king over your word; and every gesture and action shall indicate power at rest. They must be inspired by the good heart. There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy, and not pain, around us.
  • p. 167

• Nature is the best posture-master.
  • p. 167

• The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure. You must have genius or a prodigious usefulness if you will hide the want of measure.
  • p. 167

• Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the One breaks in everywhere.
  • p. 182

• Nature is no sentimentalist, — does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman, but swallows your ships like a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons.
  • p. 182

• Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of Nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is million fathoms deep.
  • p. 183

• The effects of opposition are wonderful. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing of a threat, — men to whom a crisis which intimidates and paralyzes the majority — demanding, not the faculties of prudence and thrift, but comprehension, immovableness, the readiness of sacrifice — comes graceful and beloved as a bride!
  • p. 189

• Self-command is the main elegance.
  • p. 205

• The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.
  • p. 212

• Revolutions never go backwards.
  • p. 214

• The activity of to-day and the assurance of to-morrow.
  • p. 215

• We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter we stand by the old — reformers in the morning, conservatives at night. Reform is affirmative, conservatism is negative; conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth.
  • p. 223

• Natural religion supplies still all the facts which are disguised under the dogma of popular creeds. The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals.
  • p. 223

• The best lightning-rod for your protection is your own spine.
  • p. 236

• Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debaucher of sentiment?
  • p. 236

• His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand to embody any capricious thought that is uppermost in her mind. The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together by a subtle spiritual connection.
  • p. 237

• Skepticism is slow suicide.
  • p. 240

• Society undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For everything that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet; he has a fine Geneva watch, but cannot tell the hour by the sun.
  • p. 243

• These preachers of beauty, which light the world with their admonishing smile.
  • p. 248 (Stars)

• A vivid thought brings the power to paint it; and in proportion to the depth of its source is the force of its projection.
  • p. 261

• It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence whether a man be behind it or no.
  • p. 261

• There is a kind of latent omniscience not only in every man but in every particle.
  • p. 263

Disputed

• The next thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one
  • This sentence has no known source in Emerson's works, but its general sense does closely match the tenor of Emerson's essay "Quotation and Originality", in particular the sentence "Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it." (listed above).
  • Gow, Foundations for Human Engineering (1931) contains the following passage: "I have the backing of Emerson, for it was he, I believe, who said that the next thing to saying a good thing yourself, if to quote one". It is not clear whether Gow is purporting to quote Emerson verbatim, or merely to paraphrase his work.

Misattributed

• An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.
  • This expression is widely misattributed to Emerson in journalism, tweets, and memes on the internet. This quotation in an earlier phrasing of Jared Eliot's statement “It used to be the Saying of an old Man, That an Ounce of Experience is better than a Pound of Science.” (Essays upon Field Husbandry, 1748; quotation reprinted in "Jared Eliot, Minister, Physician, Farmer" by Rodney H. True. Agricultural History Vol. 2, No. 4 (Oct. 1928), p199). The quote has also been misattributed to Friedrich Engels, a claim possibly originating from the 1975 book The Strange Case of Victor Grayson by Reg Groves (link)

• Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting—a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.
  • Though attributed to Emerson in Edwards' A Dictionary of Thoughts (1908), p. 37, this quote originates in Politics for the People (1848) by Charles Kingsley.

• To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
  • Widely attributed to Emerson on the internet, this actually originates with "What is Success?" by Bessie Anderson Stanley in Heart Throbs Volume Two (1911) edited by Joseph Mitchell Chapple.

• As soon as there is life there is danger.
  • Actually from De l'Allemagne (1813) by Madame de Stael.

• Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.
• Variation: If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he builds his house in the woods the world will make a beaten path to his door.
  • Investigations have failed to confirm this in Emerson's writings (John H. Lienhard. "A better moustrap", Engines of our Ingenuity). Also reported as a misattribution in Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 25. Note that Emerson did say, as noted above, "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".

• When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
  • Widely attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson on the internet; however, a presumably definitive source of Emerson's works at http://www.rwe.org fails to confirm any occurrence of this phrase across his works. This phrase is found in remarks attributed to Charles A. Beard in Arthur H. Secord, "Condensed History Lesson", Reader's Digest, February 1941, p. 20; but the origin has not been determined. Possibly confused with a passage in "Illusions" in which Emerson discusses his experience in the "Star Chamber": "our lamps were taken from us by the guide, and extinguished or put aside, and, on looking upwards, I saw or seemed to see the night heaven thick with stars glimmering more or less brightly over our heads, and even what seemed a comet flaming among them. All the party were touched with astonishment and pleasure. Our musical friends sung with much feeling a pretty song, "The stars are in the quiet sky," &c., and I sat down on the rocky floor to enjoy the serene picture. Some crystal specks in the black ceiling high overhead, reflecting the light of a half–hid lamp, yielded this magnificent effect."

• Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.
  • Attributed to Emerson in The Gift of Depression: Twenty-one Inspirational Stories Sharing Experience, Strength, and Hope (2001) by John F. Brown, p. 56, no prior occurrence of this statement has been located; it seems to be derived from one which occurs in The Alchemist (1988) by Paulo Coelho, p. 22: When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.

• What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
  • As reported by Quoteinvestigator on January 11, 2011 the quote appeared in "Meditations in Wall Street" (1940) by Wall Street trader Henry Stanley Haskins, "a Wall Street trader with a checkered background. The phrase was misattributed because the true author's name was initially withheld. In addition, the assignment of the maxim to a more prestigious individual, e.g., Emerson or Thoreau, made it more attractive and more believable as a nugget of wisdom." Emerson made a number of similar statements — in "The American Scholar," for example, he says "Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds" — which probably increased the likelihood of misattribution.

• The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
  • Attributed to Emerson in Life's Instructions for Wisdom, Success, and Happiness (2000) by H. Jackson Brown Jr., as well as numerous online sources since, the article "The Purpose of Life Is Not To Be Happy But To Matter" at the Quote Investigator indicates that this quote is probably derived from various statements first made by Leo Rosten, including the following words delivered at the National Book Awards held in New York in 1962: "The purpose of life is not to be happy — but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you lived at all."

• For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.
  • No known source in Emerson's works; first found as a piece of anonymous folk wisdom in a 1936 newspaper column:

Every minute you are angry, you lose 60 seconds of happiness.

• Junius, "Office Cat", The Daily Freeman [Kingston, NY] (30 December 1936), p. 6

• No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing.
  • Widely misattributed to Emerson on the Internet, this quote is actually taken from Alfred North Whitehead's essay "Harvard: The Future" (The Atlantic Monthly, September 1936.)

Quotes about Emerson

Sorted alphabetically by author or source

• So gentle that he seemed only reading to one person, and yet his voice was so distinct that it filled the room in its lowest tones.
  • Charles Bradlaugh, of Emerson's manner, as quoted in Ralph Waldo Emerson, His Life, Writings, and Philosophy (1881) by George Willis Cooke, p. 179

• That which struck me most, as distinguishing him from most other human beings, is nobility. He is a born nobleman.
  • Fredrika Bremer, The homes of the New World: impressions of America (1853), p. 154

• It was a maxim with him that power is not so much shown in talent or in successful performance as in tone; the absolute or the victorious tone ... He disliked limitations, and welcomed whatever promised to get rid of them, without always inquiring very closely what was left when they were removed.
  • James Elliot Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1887)

• "We, as we read," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in an essay on history, "must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly."
  • Edwidge Danticat chapter 1, "Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work"

• England laughed at American authorship and we sent her Emerson...
  • Frederick Douglass, "Self-Made Men" (1872)

• Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion of Mexico were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists...Emerson supported territorial expansion at any cost but would have preferred it take place without war.
  • Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (2014)

• He is the most original mind America has hitherto produced.
  • George Gilfillan, A Gallery of Literary Portraits (1845), p. 301

• He is a perfect swimmer on the ocean of modern existence. He dreads no tempest, for he is sure that calm will follow it.
  • Herman Grimm, 1861 essay, as quoted in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Philosopher and Poet (1881) by Alfred Hudson Guernsey, p. 16

• [A] great original thinker, who had his earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village. ... People that had lighted on a new thought or a thought that they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary.
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)

• [N]o one has had so steady and constant and above all so natural, a vision of what we require and what we are capable of in the way of aspiration and independence.
  • Henry James, Partial Portraits (1888), p. 9

• He liked to taste but not to drink—least of all to become intoxicated.
  • Henry James, Partial Portraits (1888), p. 25

• Emerson: German philosophy that in crossing the great water took some on underway.
  • Karl Kraus, Dicta and Contradicta, J. McVey, trans. (2001), #757

• I love Emerson, I just had a problem with something I read in his journal. He was talking about Asians. Chinese, specifically. He said they had no culture to speak of, no music. He said they're not even as good as the Africans, who are at least willing to carry our wood. And he said that they've done nothing useful except manage "to preserve to a hair / for three or four thousand years / the ugliest features in the world." The poem begins by looking at the face of this butcher. So it's about that-it's about countenance, and it's about what the culture defines as beauty or ugliness. It's a weird wrestling I'm doing with Emerson. I can't imagine me without Emerson. And yet there's this thing about him that gets to me. That's deep in the culture.
  • Li-Young Lee 1995 interview included in Poetry in Person edited by Alexander Neubauer (2010)

• What, then, is his secret? Is it not that he out-Yankees us all? that his range includes us all? that he is equally at home with the potato disease and original sin, with pegging shoes and the Over-soul? that, as we try all trades, so has he tried all cultures? and above all, that his mysticism gives us a counterpoise to our super-practicality?
  • James Russell Lowell, My Study Windows (1871), "Emerson, the Lecturer"

• There is no man living to whom, as a writer, so many of us feel and thankfully acknowledge so great an indebtedness for ennobling impulses.
  • James Russell Lowell, My Study Windows (1871), "Emerson, the Lecturer"

• There was a majesty about him beyond all other men I have known, and he habitually dwelt in that ampler and diviner air to which most of us, if ever, only rise in spurts.
  • James Russell Lowell, as quoted in Oliver Wendell Holmes's Ralph Waldo Emerson (1884)

• Modern technics, even apart from the special arts that it fostered, had a cultural contribution to make in its own right. Just as science underlined the respect for fact, so technics emphasized the importance of function: in this domain, as Emerson pointed out, the beautiful rests on the foundation of the necessary.
  • Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934) Ch. 7 "Assimilation of the Machine"

• A cheery, child-like soul, impervious to the evidence of evil.
  • George Santayana, "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy" in University of California Chronicle, Vol. 13 (1911), p. 366

• Emerson broke away from all conditions of age or country and represented nothing except intelligence itself.
  • George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1911), p. 50

• I love Emerson, the first great American writer.
  • 1987 interview in Conversations with Susan Sontag edited by Leland Poague (1995)

• Virtually at the same time as Kierkegaard gave philosophical significance to moods, Emerson was doing the same. In "Experience" he characterized our life experiences as "a train of moods" that color whatever we encounter, and he described life as "a flux of moods" that affect our "states of mind."
  • Nineteenth-century prose v. 30 The Emerson Enigma by George M Stack, 2003 p. 444

• Emerson's prose is full of poetry, and his poems are light and air. ... His modes of expression, like his epithets, are imaginative.
  • Edmund Clarence Stedman, Poets of America (1885), pp. 134 & 164

• We are told of his mode of preparing an essay,—of the slow-growing medley of thoughts on a topic, at last brought out and strung at random, like a child's variegated beads.
  • Edmund Clarence Stedman, Poets of America (1885), p. 160

• He began where many poets end, seeking at once the upper air, the region of pure thought and ideality. ... Emerson was the freest and most ideal of them all, and what came to him by inheritance or prophetic forecast he gave like a victor.
  • Edmund Clarence Stedman, Poets of America (1885), pp. 176–177

• American self-confidence, Emerson argued, should be grounded not in a narrow chauvinistic claim about the superiority of the American way but rather in a mature affirmation of America's gifts to the world as well as candid acknowledgment of the "most un-handsome part of our condition." Cheap American patriotism not only reflects an immaturity and insecurity, he warned, but also is an adolescent defense mechanism that reveals a fear to engage the world and learn from others. Narrow nationalism is a handmaiden of imperial rule, he argues-it keeps the populace deferential and complacent. Hence it abhors critics and dissenters like Emerson who unsettle and awaken the people. His shining example of democratic intellectual work is a challenge to us today. This challenge has been taken up through the years by a stream of Emersonian voices-from Walt Whitman to William James, Gertrude Stein. W. E. B. Du Bois, and Muriel Rukeyser.
  • Cornel West Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (2004)

• Even when provocation was great, his satire was so gentle and genial that it warmed even its object.
  • Charles Johnson Woodbury, Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson (1890), p. 43

External links

• Emerson Central
• Ralph Waldo Emerson tribute site
• Emerson at Transcendentalists.com
  • Essays
• Emerson at the Academy of American Poets
• Emerson at LucidCafe Library
• A Tribute to Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Poetry and Imagination 1872
• The Complete Works of Emerson in searchable texts
• Reading Ralph Waldo Emerson, a site with excerpts from Emerson's journals, at the Internet Archive