Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

When we quarrel,

how we wish we had been blameless.

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.

I have no hostility to nature,

but a child's love to it.

I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.

I have lost my mental faculties but am perfectly well.

Men love to wonder,

and that is the seed of science.

God enters by a private door into every individual.

Only as far as the masters of the world

have called in nature to their aid,

can they reach the height of magnificence.

This is the meaning of their hanging

gardens, villas, houses, islands, parks, and preserves.

The value of a principle is

the number of things it will explain.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe.

The faith that stands on authority is not faith.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life,

and urge doing.

I am content with knowing,

if only I could know.

Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment

in application to the duties of life.

We are symbols,

and inhabit symbols.

Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old,

but of the natural.

Wherever the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you,

speak the very truth,

as your life and conscience teach it,

and cheer the waiting,

fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation.

Great men are they who see that

spiritual is stronger than any material force

that thoughts rule the world.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

The man of genius inspires us

with a boundless confidence in our own powers.

The intuition of the moral sentiment

is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul.

These laws execute themselves.

They are out of time, out of space,

and not subject to circumstance.