Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson
For it is not meters, but a metermaking argument that makes a poem—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
To live without duties is obscene.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wouldst thou shut up the avenues of ill, Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We must be our own before we can be another's.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
'Tis the good reader that makes the good book;… in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Coal lay in ledges under the ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the surface. We may will call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson