Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

The landscape belongs to the person who looks at it.

Do not cumber yourself with fruitless pains to mend and remedy remote effects; let the soul be erect, and all things will go well.

Life is too short to waste In critic peep or cynic bark, Quarrel or reprimand: 'Twill soon be dark; Up, heed thine own aim, and God speed the mark!

The kitchen clock is more convenient than sidereal time. We must use the popular category, as we do by the Linnæan classification, for convenience, and not as exact and final. Otherwise, we are presently confounded, when the best-settled traits of one race are claimed by some new ethnologist as precisely characteristic of the rival tribe.

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

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.

We are now so far from the road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained but inexplicable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.

We have the same interest in condition and character. We honor the rich, because they have externally the freedom, power, and grace which we feel to be proper to man, proper to us.

Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. It is vain to hurry it. By trusting it to the end, it shall ripen into truth, and you shall know why you believe.

Oh, what have I to do with time?

Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate