Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

Fame is proof that people are gullible.

In the woods, we return to reason and faith.

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use...In God, every end is converted into a new means.

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.

Don't trust children with edge tools. Don't trust man, great God, with more power than he has until he has learned to use that little better. What a hell we should make of the world if we could do what we would!

The man is the head of the house but the woman is the neck that turns the head.

But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream.

My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me.

What we fear of doing most is usually what we most need to do.