27 Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes on Philosophy

Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes on philosophy

2. The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.

12. Self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God.

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

33. Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see - not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.

43. I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.

45. Blessed are those who have no talent!

49. Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generation beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe. Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?

57. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.

64. The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.

71. The ancestor of every action is a thought.

75. Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.

78. Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same.

91. Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so.

111. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

115. Every thing in nature contains all the powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff.

125. I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.

140. For it is not metres, but a metre-making 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.

149. Of what use is genius, if the organ is too convex or too concave and cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon of human life?

150. Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate, - and meantime it is only puss and her tail. How long before our masquerade will end its noise of tambourines, laughter, and shouting, and we shall find it was a solitary performance?

154. Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.

167. For there's no rood has not a star above it; The cordial quality of pear or plum Ascends as gladly in a single tree, As in broad orchards resonant with bees; And every atom poises for itself, And for the whole.

170. Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing, Then beauty is its own excuse for Being.

173. There are two laws discrete Not reconciled, Law for man, and law for thing.

234. Far or forgot to me is near; Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear; And one to me are shame and fame.

259. Alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.

281. Now shall we say that only the first men were well alive, and the existing generation is invalided and degenerate? ... A more subtle and severe criticism might suggest that some dislocation has befallen the race; that men are off their centre; that multitudes of men do not live with Nature, but behold it as exiles. People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in the world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority.

297. The Bhagavad Gita is an empire of thought and in its philosophical teachings Lord Krishna has all the attributes of the full-fledged montheistic deity and at the same time the attributes of the Upanisadic absolute.