Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.

Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

The earth laughs in flowers.

Every artist was first an amateur.

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

A man in debt is so far a slave.

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.