Ralph Waldo Emerson Wise Quotations

Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.

Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

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.

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser.

Will is the measure of power. To a great genius there must be a great will. If the thought is not a lamp to the will, does not proceed to an act, the wise are imbecile. He alone is strong and happy who has a will. The rest are herds. He uses; they are used. He is of the Maker; they are of the Made. Will is always miraculous, being the presence of God to men. When it appears in a man he is a hero, and all metaphysics are at fault.

Our country, customs, laws, our ambitions, and our notions of fit and fair-all these we never made; we found them ready-made; we but quote from them. What would remain to me if this art of appropriation were derogatory to genius? Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand things; wise and foolish have brought me, without suspecting it, the offering of their thoughts, faculties, and experience. My work is an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature. It bears the name of Goethe.

When there is sympathy, there needs but one wise man in a company and all are wise,--so, a blockhead makes a blockhead of his companion. Wonderful power to benumb possesses this brother.

Wise men read very sharply all your private history in your look and gait and behavior. The whole economy of nature is bent on expression. The tell-tale body is all tongues. Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces which expose the whole movement.

Hence, the less government we have, the better,--the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formalGovernment, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing government, is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation.

There was never a man born so wise or good, but one or more companions came into the world with him, who delight in his faculty, and report it. I cannot see without awe, that no man thinks alone and no man acts alone, but the divine assessors who came up with him into life,--now under one disguise, now under another,--like a police in citizen's clothes, walk with him, step for step, through all kingdoms of time.

The wise and just man will always feel that he stands on his own feet; that he imparts strength to the state, not receives security from it; and if all went down, he and such as he would quite easily combine in a new and better constitution.

Humility is the secret of the wise.

But the wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting; that the State must follow, and notlead the character and progress of the citizen; the strongest usurper is quickly got rid of; and they only who build on Ideas, build for eternity; and that the form of government which prevails, is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it.

Freedom is the essence of this faith. It has for its object simply to make men good and wise. Its institutions then should be as flexible as the wants of men. That form out of which the life and suitableness have departed should be as worthless in its eyes as the dead leaves that are falling around us.

Is it not manifest that our academic institutions should have a wider scope; that they should not be timid and keep the ruts of the last generation, but that wise men thinking for themselves and heartily seeking the good of mankind, and counting the cost of innovation, should dare to arouse the young to a just and heroic life; that the moral nature should be addressed in the school-room, and children should be treated as the high-born candidates of truth and virtue?

It seems as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned out five or six men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu, and Columbus, was no wise discontented with the result. These samples attested the virtue of the tree.

A wise writer will feel that the ends of study and composition are best answered by announcing undiscovered regions of thought, and so communicating, through hope, new activity to the torpid spirit.

Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen from the nook and chimneyside of prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front.

When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well spare,--muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works that belong to these. But the central wisdom, which was old in infancy, is young in fourscore years, and dropping off obstructions, leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise.

It is the delight of vulgar talent to dazzle and to bind the beholder. But true genius seeks to defend us from itself. True geniuswill not impoverish, but will liberate, and add new sense. If a wise man should appear in our village, he would create, in those who conversed with him, a new consciousness of wealth, by opening their eyes to unobserved advantages; he would establish a sense of immovable equality, calm us with assurances that we could not be cheated; as every one would discern the checks and guarantees of condition.

To educate the wise man, the State exists; and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires. The appearance of charactermakes the state unnecessary. The wise man is the State.

It is so wonderful to our neurologists that a man can see without his eyes, that it does not occur to them that is just as wonderful that he should see with them; and that is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual.

That you are fair or wise is vain, Or strong, or rich, or generous; You must have also the untaught strain That sheds beauty on the rose.

Manners have been somewhat cynically defined to be a contrivance of wise men to keep fools at a distance. Fashion is shrewd to detect those who do not belong to her train, and seldom wastes her attentions. Society is very swift in its instincts, and if you do not belong to it, resists and sneers at you, or quietly drops you.

Wise cultivated, genial conversation is the last flower of civilization, and the best result which life has to offer us,--a cup for gods, which has no repentance. Conversation is our account of ourselves. All we have, all we can, all we know, is brought into play, and as the reproduction in finer form, of all our havings.

A man is a golden impossibility. The line he must walk is a hair's breadth. The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.

[The wise skeptic does not teach doubt but how] to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting.

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.

Wise men read very sharply all of your private history in your look and gait and behavior.

Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today.

Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness, -- whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so.

Plato says that the punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is, to live under the government of worse men; and the like regret is suggested to all the auditors, as the penalty of abstaining to speak,--that they shall hear worse orators than themselves.

At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find Nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her.

Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.

Wise men put their trust in ideas and not in circumstances.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

We live in succession, in division, in parts and particles. Meantime, within man, is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One.

Within us is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, the eternal One.

When you strike at a king, you must kill him.

Life is a festival only to the wise.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

A moody child and wildly wise Pursued the game with joyful eyes, Which chose, like meteors, their way, And rived the dark with private ray.

Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the respective heads of two schools. A wise man will see that Aristotle platonizes.

The Times are the masquerade of the eternities; trivial to the dull, tokens of noble and majestic agents to the wise; the receptacle in which the Past leaves its history; the quarry out of which the genius of today is building up the Future.

But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God.

The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet.

That is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual; the wise man wonders at the usual.

Ah Fate, cannot a man Be wise without a beard? East, West, from Beer to Dan, Say, was it never heard That wisdom might in youth be gotten, Or wit be ripe before 't was rotten?

Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had?

I am old, yet I look at wise men and see that I am very young. I look over those stars yonder, and into the myriads of the aspirant and ordered souls, and see I am a stranger and a youth and have yet my spurs to win. Too ridiculous are these airs of age.

The simplicity of the universe is very different from the simplicity of a machine. The simplicity of nature is not that which may be easily read but is inexhaustible. The last analysis can no wise be made.

We are all wise for other people, none for himself.

The day is always his, who works in it with serenity and great aims.

The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon.

THE POET A moody child and wildly wise Pursued the game with joyful eyes, Which chose, like meteors, their way, And rived the dark with private ray: They overleapt the horizon's edge, Searched with Apollo's privilege; Through man, and woman, and sea, and star, Saw the dance of nature forward far; Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times, Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes. Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us young, And always keep us so.

Go where he will, the wise man is at home, His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome.

If you are wise, you will dread a prosperity which only loads you with more.

The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting.

The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.

Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.

Let us be poised, wise and our own today.

Wise men are not wise at all times.

The wise man always throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his weak point.

A cultivated man, wise to know and bold to perform, is the end to which nature works.

The wise man, the true friend, the finished character, we seek everywhere, and only find in fragments.

We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise.

I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

The foolish man wonders at the unusual, but the wise man at the usual.

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant

I am sure of this, that by going much alone a man will get more of a noble courage in thought and word than from all the wisdom that is in books.

Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are.

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

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.

History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by language and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived.

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.