Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love.

Your goodness must have some edge to it,

else it is none.

A more secret, sweet,

and overpowering beauty appears to man

when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of

a palace has an animal nature,

rude and aboriginal as a white bear.

God screens us evermore from premature ideas.

As soon as there is life there is danger.

A man's growth is seen in

the successive choirs of his friends.

Character is always known.

Thefts never enrich;

alms never impoverish;

murder will speak out of stone walls.

A man is a method,

a progressive arrangement;

a selecting principle,

gathering his like to him;

wherever he goes.

What you are comes to you.

Give a boy address and accomplishments

and you give him the mastery of palaces

and fortunes where he goes.

No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

People with great gifts are easy to find,

but symmetrical and balanced ones never.

It is my desire,

in the office of a Christian minister,

to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart.

Having said this,

I have said all.

Children are all foreigners.

Friendship,

like the immortality of the soul,

is too good to be believed.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Without electricity,

the air would rot.