Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.

Our strength grows out of our weakness

Nature, as we know her, is no saint…. She comes eating and drinking and sinning.

The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society.

That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new. Shall I not call God the beautiful, who daily showeth himself so to me in his gifts?

The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul. The position men have given to Jesus, now for many centuries of history, is a position of authority. It characterizes themselves. It cannot alter the eternal facts.

It's not the destination, it's the journey.

I have no expectation that any man will read history aright, who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing to-day.

If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.

When an artist runs out of inspiration or a scholar wearies of books, they always have the ability to live. Character is more important than intellect. Life is primary; our thoughts about it are secondary.

Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods arrive.