5 Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes on Meaning

Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes on meaning

25. The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.

67. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; - show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the ledger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing; - and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.

76. History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, - see how it could and must be.

141. We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

185. Things added to things, as statistics, civil history, are inventories. Things used as language are inexhaustibly attractive.