Ralph Waldo Emerson Men Quotations

In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.

No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.

The highest revelation is that God is in every man.

A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him; wherever he goes.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

A man in debt is so far a slave.

Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the 'Not Me,' that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, 'Nature.'

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.

Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.

A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.

A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts.

Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.

Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.

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

In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.

Wherever the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation.

I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

The majority of men are bundles of beginnings

Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyph to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth.

You have a place to live in this world which no other man can occupy; hence no competitors.

In the Fiji islands, it appears, cannibalism is now familiar. They eat thier own wives and children. We only devour widows' houses, and great merchants outwit and absorb the substance of small ones, and every man feeds on his neighbor's labor if he can. It is a milder form of cannibalism.

I cannot marry the facts of William Shakespeare to his verse: Other men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man is in wide contrast.

It is only as a man puts off from himself all external support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail.

To a physician, each man, each woman, is an amplification of one organ.

We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate thier virtue or vice by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath ever moment....One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zsig zag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficent distance and it straightens itslef to the average tendency.

A man must know how to estimate a sour face. The sour face of the multitude, like thier sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and the newspaper directs.

If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, - under all these screens I have diffuculty to detect the precise man you are: and of course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blind-man's bluff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect I anticipate your argument.

The world exists for the education of each man.

If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience.

It is rare to find a man who believes in his own thoughts or speaks that which he is created to say. As nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing, so nothing is more rare in any man than an act of his own...feel yourself, and be not daunted by things...The light by which we see this world comes out from the soul of the observer.

Every individual man has a bias which he must obey, and...it is only as he feels and obeys this that he rightly develops and attains his legitimate power in the world. It is his magnetic needle, which points always in one direction to his proper path.... He is never happy nor strong until he finds it, keeps it.

Eloquence shows the power and possibility of man. There is one of whom we took no note, but on a certain occasion it appears that he has a secret virtue never suspected - that he can paint what has occurred and what must occur, with such clearness to a company, as if they saw it done before their eyes. By leading their thought he leads their will, and can make them do gladly what an hour ago they would not believe that they could be led to do at all.

A determined man, by his very attitude and the tone of his voice, puts a stop to defeat, and begins to conquer.

Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.

But in our experience, man is cheap and friendship wants its deep sense. We affect to dwell with our friends in their absence, but we do not; when deed, word, or letter comes not, they let us go.

So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self.

When its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England, and arriving at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into harmony with nature.

A hero is a man who is afraid to run away.

I have only one doctrine, the infinitude of the private man.

Where the banana grows man is sensual and cruel.

The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. ... In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections.

Every man is the inlet and may become the outlet of all there is in God.

What a man does, that he has. What has he to do with hope or fear? In himself is his might. Let him regard no good as solid but that which is in his nature, and which must grow out of him as long as he exists. The goods of fortune may come and go like summer leaves; let him scatter them on every wind as the momentary signs of his infinite productiveness.

Every man has a choice between love of truth and love of repose. Love of repose brings him a solid reputation and peaceful life; love of truth keeps him in suspense. A man who loves truth respects the highest law of his being.

When a man becomes cultivated, he develops a new respect for who he is. This causes him to be ashamed of his past identification of himself and others according to things, i.e. property.

Real men don't conform to the beliefs of others, even when society has concluded on what is good and true, but maintain the integrity of their own mind.

The amount of a man's wealth consists in the number of things he can do without.

I find it more credible, since it is anterior information, that one man should know heaven, as the Chinese say, than that so many men should know the world.

I knew a witty physician who found theology in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was a disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian.

The height, the deity of man is to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is good when it does not violate me, but best when it is likest to solitude.

A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light.

A man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture. We must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate entertainments of poetry and philosophy, in the work of our hands.

Great believers are always reckoned infidels, impracticable, fantastic, atheistic, and really men of no account. The spiritualist finds himself driven to express his faith by a series of skepticisms.

To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the masterworks and chief men of each race. It is to have the sea, by voyaging; to visit the mountains, Niagara, the Nile, the desert, Rome, Paris, Constantinople: to see galleries, libraries, arsenals, manufactories.

Examples are cited by soldiers, of men who have seen the cannon pointed, and the fire given to it, and who have stepped aside from he path of the ball. The terrors of the storm are chiefly confined to the parlour and the cabin.

Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations. The only sin is limitation. As soon as you once come up with a man's limitations, it is all over with him.

I have never met a man who was not my superior in some particular.

A true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the center of things.

Henceforth, please God, forever I forego the yolk of men's opinions. I will be light-hearted as a bird and live with God. I find him in the bottom of my heart, and I hear continually his voice therein.

The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought.

Not gold, but only man can make a people great and strong; men who, for truth and honor's sake, stand fast and suffer long.

The God who made New Hampshire Taunted the lofty land With little men.

We commonly say that the rich man can speak the truth, can afford honesty, can afford independence of opinion and action;--and that is the theory of nobility. But it is the rich man in a true sense, that is to say, not the man of large income and large expenditure, but solely the man whose outlay is less than his income and is steadily kept so.

The goof man, in dealing with his people, taxes them with luxury.

The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man.

A right rule for a club would be, Admit no man whose presence excludes any one topic. It requires people who are not surprised andshocked, who do and let do, and let be, who sink trifles, and know solid values, and who take a great deal for granted.

A man in a cave or in a camp, a nomad, will die with no more estate than the wolf or the horse leaves.

All forms of government symbolize an immortal government, common to all dynasties and independent of numbers, perfect where two men exist, perfect where there is only one man.

Is not, indeed, every man a student, and do not all things exist for the student's behoof?

When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen.

A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, and, however he may serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, cannot be saidto have arrived at self-possession.

As thinkers, mankind has ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final and say, The senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealists on the power of Thought and Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture.

A man must keep an eye on his servants, if he would not have them rule him.

Fashion which affects to be honor, is often, in all men's experience, only a ballroom-code.

Again, the great number of cultivated men keep each other up to a high standard. The habit of meeting well-read and knowing men teaches the art of omission and selection.

Each man too is a tyrant in tendency, because he would impose his idea on others; and their trick is their natural defence. Jesuswould absorb the race; but Tom Paine or the coarsest blasphemer helps humanity by resisting this exuberance of power.

I quote another man's saying; unluckily, that other withdraws himself in the same way, and quotes me.

Beside all the moral benefit which we may expect from the farmer's profession, when a man enters it considerately, this promised the conquering of the soil, plenty, and beyond this, the adorning of the country with every advantage and ornament which labor, ingenuity, and affection for a man's home, could suggest.

Every man is wanted, and no man is wanted much.

The age of puberty is a crisis in the age of man worth studying. It is the passage from the unconscious to the conscious; from thesleep of passions to their rage.

A man is but a little thing in the midst of the objects of nature, yet, by the moral quality radiating from his countenance, he may abolish all considerations of magnitude, and in his manners equal the majesty of the world.

Manners aim to facilitate life, to get rid of impediments, and bring the man pure to energize. They aid our dealing and conversation, as a railway aids travelling, by getting rid of all avoidable obstructions of the road, and leaving nothing to be conquered but pure space.

Manners are very communicable: men catch them from each other.

How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father's or mother's life?

Every man is not so much a workman in the world as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age.

In our large cities, the population is godless, materialized,--no bond, no fellow-feeling, no enthusiasm. These are not men, but hungers, thirsts, fevers, and appetites walking. How is it people manage to live on,--so aimless as they are? After their peppercorn aims are gained, it seems as if the lime in their bones alone held them together, and not any worthy purpose.

Egotism is a kind of buckram that gives momentary strength and concentration to men, and seems to be much used in Nature for fabrics in which local and spasmodic energy is required.

A man should not go where he cannot carry his whole sphere or society with him,Mnot bodily, the whole circle of his friends, but atmospherically. He should preserve in a new company the same attitude of mind and reality of relation, which his daily associates draw him to, else he is shorn of his best beams, and will be an orphan in the merriest club.