Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition

Tis not in the high stars alone, Nor in the cup of budding flowers, Nor in the redbreast's mellow tone, Nor in the bow that smiles in showers, But in the mud and scum of things There alway, alway something sings.

True love transcends the unworthy object, and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its independency the surer.

I wait for the hour when that divine Beauty, which ravished the hearts of the Hebrew prophets, Hindu and Buddhist visionaries, Christian and Sufi mystics, and Chinese sages, will make itself known in America today.

and beauty and goodness comes to each man directly, in flashes of spiritual light

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down...

Over the winter glaciers I see the summer glow, And through the wild-piled snow-drift The warm rosebuds below.

The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.

Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creep into a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution. In proportion to the energy of his thought and will, he takes up the world into himself.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

The ancestor of every action is a thought. Ralph Waldo Emerson

The soul is what knows—and draws us towards—truth, beauty, and goodness. Moreover, for Emerson, each person's soul is only a part of the great, universal "over-soul." He describes the soul as a vast ocean, with our individual souls being tiny inlets into the shore. Individuality is an illusion—really, we're all connected, like fingers extending from one hand.