Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

...the poor man, whom the law does not allow to take an ear of corn when starving, nor a pair of shoes for his freezing feet, is allowed to put his hand into the pocket of the rich, and say, You shall educate me, not as you will, but as I will...

Miss Austen’s novels … seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer … is marriageableness.

Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.

The years teach much the days never know.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

When its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England, and arriving at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into harmony with nature. The boat at St. Petersburgh, which plies along the Lena by magnetism, needs little to make it sublime. When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation.

I cannot remember the books Ive read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

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 unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes; and though they know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or twenty centuries for us,—some of them,—and are eager to give us a sign and unbosom themselves, it is the law of their limbo that they must not speak until spoken to; and as the enchanter has dressed them, like battalions of infantry, in coat and jacket of one cut, by the thousand and ten thousand, your chance of hitting on the right one is to be computed by the arithmetical rule of Permutation and Combination,—not a choice out of three caskets, but out of half a million caskets, all alike.

Your goodness must have some edge to it -- else it is none.

Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholars idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other mens transcripts of their readings.

There are books which take rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.

Spiritual force is stronger than material force thoughts rule the world.

Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.

Fear always springsfrom ignorance.