Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Is not prayer a study of truth, a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

The divine bards are the friends of my virtue, of my intellect, of my strength. They admonish me that the gleams which flash across my mind are not mine, but God's; they had the like, and were not disobedient to the heavenly vision

The ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.

Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel, was never opened; there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every man believes that he has a greater possibility.

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you.

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

Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

If a man is at once acquainted with the geometric foundation of things and with their festal splendor, his poetry is exact and his arithmetic musical.

We will meet as though we met not and part as though we parted not.

Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven.

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm...Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

A man must consider what rich realms he abdicates when he becomes a conformist