1
The life of truth is cold.Ralph Waldo Emerson
2
At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say, –' Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act.Ralph Waldo Emerson
3
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.Ralph Waldo Emerson
4
Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.Ralph Waldo Emerson
5
It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem, –a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.Ralph Waldo Emerson
6
Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.Ralph Waldo Emerson
7
The mystic must be steadily told, – All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric, –universal signs, instead of these village symbols, –and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.Ralph Waldo Emerson
8
I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today.Ralph Waldo Emerson
9
Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.Ralph Waldo Emerson
10
We are immensed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision.Ralph Waldo Emerson
11
We, as we read, 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.Ralph Waldo Emerson
12
Does not… the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound?Ralph Waldo Emerson
13
He is a dull observer whose experience has not taught him the reality and force of magic, as well as of chemistry.Ralph Waldo Emerson
14
Life goes headlong. We chase some flying scheme, or we are hunted by some fear or command behind us. But if suddenly we encounter a friend, we pause; our heat and hurry look foolish enough; now pause, now possession, is required, and the power to swell the moment from the resources of the heart. The moment is all, in all noble relations.Ralph Waldo Emerson
15
There are many eyes that can detect and honor the prudent and household virtues; there are many that can discern Genius on his starry track, though the mob is incapable; but when that love which is all-suffering, all-abstaining, all-aspiring, which has vowed to itself, that it will be a wretch and also a fool in this world, sooner than soil its white hands by any compliances, comes into our streets and houses, --only the pure and aspiring can know its face, and the only compliment they can pay it, is to own it.Ralph Waldo Emerson