Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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

Every man is a new method.

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.

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 bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.

Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor time unmake what poets know.

I hung my verse in the wind Time and tide their faults will find.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have yet to be discovered.

There are two classes of poets — the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.

Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.

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.

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.

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.

Nothing can be preserved that is not good.