Ralph Waldo Emerson Mind Quotations

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

Nature is the incarnation of thought. The world is the mind precipitated.

It came into him life, it went out from him truth. It came to him short-lived actions; it went from him poetry. It was a dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in porportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it live.

For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible

A chief event in life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us

The great poet makes us feel our own wealth, and then we think less of his compositions. His best communication to our mind is to teach us to despise all he has done.

Stand guard at the portal of your mind.

All natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence.

Foolish consistencies are the hobgoblins of small minds!

How can we speak of the action of the mind under any divisions, as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so forth, since it melts will into perception, knowledge into act? Each becomes the other. Itself alone is.

Every mind is different; and the more it is unfolded, the more pronounced is that difference.

Walking has the best value as gymnastics of the mind.

Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest so rare and insignificant-and this commonly on the ground of other reading and hearing-that in large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

The religion which is to guide and fulfill the present and coming ages, whatever else it be, must be intellectual. The scientific mind must have a faith which is science.

The need for a rational consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

It is noticed, that the consideration of the great periods and spaces of astronomy induces a dignity of mind, and an indifferenceto death.

American mind a wilderness of opportunities.

The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but pleasantly, and, as it were, merrily, he advancesto his own music, alike in frightful alarms and in the tipsy mirth of universal dissoluteness.

Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, as we shall yet have an American genius.

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same.

Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.

We hear eagerly every thought and word quoted from an intellectual man. But in his presence our own mind is roused to activity, and we forget very fast what he says.

But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also the law of the human mind?

The mind is a finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing, excluding, and generating, in a new and ethereal element. Here, in the brain, is all the process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, comparing, digesting, and assimilating of experience. Here again is the mystery of generation repeated.

Thought dissolves the material universe by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic.

Generalization is always a new influx of divinity into the mind. Hence the thrill that attends it.

No nation has produced anything like his equal. There is no quality in the human mind, there is no class of topics, there is no region of thought, in which he has not soared or descended, and none in which he has not said the commanding word.

It is the property of the religious spirit to be the most refining of all influences. No external advantages, no culture of the tastes, no habit of command, no association with the elegant, or even depth of affection, can bestow that delicacy and that grandeur of bearing which belong only to the mind accustomed to celestial conversation,--all else is but gilt and cosmetics, beside this, as expressed in every look and gesture.

Time is indeed the theater and seat of illusions; nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century, and dwarfs an age to an hour.

Consistency is the bugbear that frightens little minds.

Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of Nature re-forms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.

A great mind is a good sailor, as a great heart is.

Each mind has its own method.

The restraining grace of common sense is the mark of all valid minds.

The word unto the prophet spoken Was writ on tablets yet unbroken: The word by seers or sibyls told, In groves of oak or fanes of gold, Still floats upon the morning wind, Still whispers to the willing mind.

It is the ignorant and childish part of mankind that is the fighting part. Idle and vacant minds want excitement

The mind will quote whether the tongue does or not.

I'm happier. I guess I made up my mind to be that way.

Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it.

In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoon how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.

Between cultivated minds the first interview is the best.

The eye obeys exactly the action of the mind.

A believer, a mind whose faith is consciousness, is never disturbed because other persons do not yet see the fact which he sees.

The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.

He that can heroically endure adversity will bear prosperity with equal greatest of the soul; for the mind that cannot be dejected by the former is not likely to be transported without the latter.

Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.

Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.

To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself.

Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself,-must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know.

Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened.

Wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot.

Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's opinions.

Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind.

The ancestor of every action is thought; when we understand that we begin to comprehend that our world is governed by thought and that everything without had its counterpart originally within the mind.

My own mind is the direct revelation which I have from God and far least liable to mistake in telling his will of any revelation.

By the irresistible maturing of the general mind, the Christian traditions have lost their hold.

People who wash much have a high mind about it, and talk down to those who wash little.

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the rest.

A man's style is his mind's voice. Wooden minds, wooden voices.

Only that mind draws me which I cannot read.

The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose.

Every mind has a new compass, a new direction of its own, differencing its genius and aim from every other mind.--We call this specialty the bias of each individual. And none of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

Men are lenses through which we read our own minds.

Perception is a mirror not a fact. And what I look on is my state of mind, reflected outward.

The disease with which the human mind now labors is want of faith

When the Master of the universe has points to carry in his government he impresses his will in the structure of minds.

Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream.

The walls of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions.

Life is too short to waste . . . 'Twill soon be dark; Up! mind thine own aim, and God speed the mark!

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.

The universal soul is the alone creator of the useful and the beautiful; therefore to make anything useful or beautiful, the individual must be submitted to the universal mind.

The constructive intellect [genius] produces thoughts, sentences, poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the marriage of thought with nature.

There is one mind common to all individual men

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.

The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature.

Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold it's great proportions.

As Arkwright and Whitney were the demi-gods of cotton, so prolific Time will yet bring an inventor to every plant. There is not a property in nature but a mind is born to seek and find it.

Astronomy is a cold, desert science, with all its pompous figures,-depends a little too much on the glass-grinder, too little on the mind. 'T is of no use to show us more planets and systems. We know already what matter is, and more or less of it does not signify.

Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.

The the illuminated mind the whole world sparkles with light.

The true poem is the poet's mind.

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, — What is truth? and of the affections, — What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. ... Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.

I know of no such unquestionable badge and ensign of a sovereign mind as that of tenacity of purpose...

It is only when the mind and character slumber that the dress can be seen.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind.