Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson
Things have their laws as well as men, and things refuse to be trifled with.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ethics and religion differ herein; that the one is the system of human duties commencing from man; the other, from God. Religion includes the personality of God; Ethics does not.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision, his living is natural and poetic.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A garden is like those pernicious machineries which catch a man's coat-skirt or his hand, and draw in his arm, his leg , and his whole body to irresistible destruction.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is not what talents or genius a man has, but how he is to his talents, that constitutes friendship and character. The man thatstands by himself, the universe stands by him also.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man must thank his defects, and stand in some terror of his talents. A transcendent talent draws so largely on his forces as tolame him; a defect pays him revenues on the other side.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men aboutus are dupes. But life is a sincerity.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The consciousness in each man is a sliding scale, which identifies him now with the First Cause, and now with the flesh of his body; life above life, in infinite degrees.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
War, to sane men at the present day, begins to look like an epidemic insanity, breaking out here and there like the cholera or influenza, infecting men's brains instead of their bowels.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson