Ralph Waldo Emerson Power Quotations

The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a gingerbread dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame, by all these attitudes and exertions --an end of the first importance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own.

These arts open great gates of a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life out of its beggary to a god- like ease and power.

Success goes thus invariably with a certain plus or positive power: an ounce of power must balance an ounce of weight.

The household is a school of power. There, within the door, learn the tragi-comedy of human life.

You think me the child of circumstance; I make my circumstance.

He only is a well-made man who has a good determination. And the end of culture is not to destroy this, God forbid! but to train away all impediment and mixture and leave nothing but pure power.

Since everything in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is that the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.

The moral equalizes all; enriches, empowers all. It is the coin which buys all, and which all find in their pocket. Under the whipof the driver, the slave shall feel his equality with saints and heroes.

Wherever there is power, there is age. Don't be deceived by dimples and curls. I tell you that babe is a thousand years old.

There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself.

Knowledge, Virtue, Power are the victories of man over his necessities, his march to the dominion of the world.

A man is the prisoner of his power. A topical memory makes him an almanac; a talent for debate, disputant; skill to get money makes him a miser, that is, a beggar. Culture reduces these inflammations by invoking the aid of other powers against the dominant talent, and by appealing to the rank of powers. It watches success.

The people know that they need in their representative much more than talent, namely, the power to make his talent trusted.

We do not yet trust the unknown power of thoughts.

Power obeys reality, and not appearances; power is according to quality, and not quantity.

All the elements, whose aid man calls in, will sometimes become big masters.

Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and power because it is as good as money.

The power of a man increases steadily by continuing in one direction.

Coal lay in ledges under the ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the surface. We may well call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate.

Power is the first good.

Every natural power exhilarates; a true talent delights the possessor first.

Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.

Talent for talent's sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.

All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.

Valor consists in the power of self recovery.

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

A little consideration of what takes place around us every day would show us that a higher law than that of our will regulates events; that our painful labors are unnecessary and fruitless; that only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action are we strong . . . . Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment.

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

Power educates the potentate.

Wherever there is power there is age.

Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.

Don't trust children with edge tools. Don't trust man, great God, with more power than he has until he has learned to use that little better. What a hell we should make of the world if we could do what we would!

The most attractive class of people are those who are powerful obliquely, and not by the direct stroke: men of genius, but not yetaccredited: one gets the cheer of their light, without paying too great a tax.

We know that madness belongs to love,--what power to paint a vile object in hues of heaven.

The lover of letters loves power too.

A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat; self control is the rule. Anger is an uncontrollable feeling that betrays what you are when you are not yourself. Anger is that powerful internal force that blows out the light of reason. Know this to be the enemy: it is anger, born of desire.

Life is a search after power; and this is an element with which the world is so saturated,-there is no chink or crevice in which it is not lodged,-that no honest seeking goes unrewarded.

All power is of one kind, a sharing of the nature of the world. The mind that is parallel with the laws of nature will be in the current of events, and strong with their strength.

God evidently does not intend us all to be rich, or powerful or great, but He does intend us all to be friends.

When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation.

A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.

Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.

Nothing external to you has any power over you.

Anger is that powerful internal force that blows out the light of reason.

Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

Do the thing and you will be given the power

Don't trust man, great God, with more power than he has, until he has learned to use that little better

Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

Vigor is contagious, and whatever makes us either think or feel strongly adds to our power and enlarges our field of action.

Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.

The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.

Do the thing and you will have the power.

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring. Any absorbing passion has the effect to deliver from the little coils and cares of every day: 'tis the heat which sets our human atoms spinning, overcomes the friction of crossing thresholds, and first addresses in society, and gives us a good start and speed, easy to continue, when once it is begun.

Railroad iron is a magician's rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.