Ralph Waldo Emerson Spiritual Quotations

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force - that thoughts rule the world.

A great man is always willing to be little.

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.

As we refine, our checks become finer. If we rise to spiritual culture, the antagonism takes a spiritual form.

All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature.

If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed.

Marriage (in what is called the spiritual world) is impossible, because of the inequality between every subject and every object.

I remember the thought which occurred to me when some ingenious and spiritual foreigners came to America, was, Have you been victimized in being brought hither?--or, prior to that, answer me this, "Are you victimizable?

In every landscape, the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is seen from the first hillock aswell as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars at night stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common, with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna, or on the marble deserts of Egypt.

If the vast and the spiritual are omitted, so are the practical and the moral.

In our definitions, we grope after the spiritual by describing it as invisible. The true meaning of spiritual is real; that law which executes itself, which works without means, and which cannot be conceived as not existing.

I look on trade and every mechanical craft as education also. But let me discriminate what is precious herein. There is in each ofthese works an act of invention, an intellectual step, or short series of steps taken; that act or step is the spiritual act; all the rest is mere repetition of the same a thousand times.

It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervadedand dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognised itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained, the memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of particulars, and carries centuries of observation in a single formula.

But your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation.

The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of thehuman mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstacy.

Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy, or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods.

If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as "spiritual life," "God," "soul," "cross," etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent.

The art of sculpture is long ago perished to any real effect... it is the game of a rude and youthful people, and not the manly labour of a wise and spiritual nation.

We ask for long life, but 'tis deep life, or noble moments that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical.

Fear always springs from ignorance.

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.

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.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.

The possibility of interpretation lies in the identity of the observer with the observed. Each material thing has its celestial side; has its translation, through humanity, into the spiritual and necessary sphere, where it plays a part as indestructible as any other.

...as there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we see and know, Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man ever got above, but they tower over us, and most in the moment when our interests tempt us to wound them.

There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity i am bought and sold; for them i will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; - though i confess with shame i sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by i shall have the manhood to withhold.

Shakespeare possesses the power of subordinating nature for the purposes of expression, beyond all poets. His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to embody any caprice of thought that is uppermost in his mind. The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together, by subtle spiritual connection. We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet.

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.

For it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered; the infinite lies stretched in smiling repose.

Every man should let out all the length of all the reigns; should find or make a frank and healthy expression of what force and meaning is in him.

I am become a transparent eyeball...

Why should we not have a first-hand and immediate experience of God?

If two or three persons should come with a high spiritual aim and with great powers, the world would fall into their hands like a ripe peach.

Every calamity is a spur and a valuable hint.

Everything in our world, even a drop of dew, is a microcosm of the universe.