Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

The love that you withhold is the pain that you carry.

It seems as if the Deity dressed each soul which he sends into nature in certain virtues and powers not communicable to other men, and, sending it to perform one more turn through the circle of beings, wrote "Not transferable," and "Good for this trip only," on these garments of the soul.

Treat all people as if they are real, because who knows, perhaps they are.

Instead of trying to create a new religion from scratch, aim to breathe new life into the forms that already exist. If you are alive, you'll enliven all you touch. To revive faith from dead tradition, three things are needed: soul, soul, and more soul.

the sermon, that most flexible of art forms. Take the form of the sermon and make it your own. Whether you are standing behind a pulpit, in a lecture hall, or in a field, nothing can stop you from speaking the truth according to your life and conscience. The hearts of the people are thirsty for new hope and new revelation.

As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its owns books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.

Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm

Is it a reply to these suggestions, to say, society is a Pestalozzian school; all are teachers and pupils in turn. We are equally served by receiving and by imparting. Men who know the same things, are not long the best company for each other.

Go out of the house to see the moon, and' t is mere tinsel; {it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey.

There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem.

Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each other's hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man.