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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes (1803-1882)
Philosopher, Poet
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About Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (25 May 1803 – 27 April 1882) was an American philosopher, essayist, and poet.
Best Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes.
“Thou animated torrid-zone.”
“Skepticism is slow suicide.”
“Children are all foreigners.”
“Revolutions never go backwards.”
“Nature is the best posture-master.”
“Self-command is the main elegance.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes by Topic
Find exactly what you are looking for by browsing this categorized list of Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes by topic.
Ralph Waldo Emerson on Friendship 11 quotes
View all 11 quotes on Friendship →Ralph Waldo Emerson on Individualism 9 quotes
View all 9 quotes on Individualism →Ralph Waldo Emerson on Beauty 8 quotes
“Beauty without expression tires.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson on Quotations 7 quotes
“Quotation confesses inferiority.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson on Books 7 quotes
View all 7 quotes on Books →Ralph Waldo Emerson on Poetry 6 quotes
View all 6 quotes on Poetry →Ralph Waldo Emerson on Success 6 quotes
View all 6 quotes on Success →Ralph Waldo Emerson on Love 5 quotes
View all 5 quotes on Love →Ralph Waldo Emerson on Solitude 5 quotes
View all 5 quotes on Solitude →Ralph Waldo Emerson on Conformity 5 quotes
“Conformity is the ape of harmony.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson on Courage 5 quotes
“A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson on Debt 5 quotes
“Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill!”
What Ralph Waldo Emerson Said About Others
Discover personal opinions Ralph Waldo Emerson shared regarding contemporaries.
Ralph Waldo Emerson on Henry David Thoreau 11 quotes
“Henry avoids all commonplace, & talks birch bark to all comers, & reduces them all to the same insignificance.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson on Margaret Fuller 4 quotes
“I remember that she made me laugh more than I liked; for I was, at that time, an eager scholar of ethics, and had tasted the sweets of solitude and stoicism, and I found something profane in the hours of amusing gossip into which she drew me...”
Ralph Waldo Emerson on Baruch Spinoza 3 quotes
View all 3 quotes on Baruch Spinoza →Ralph Waldo Emerson on William Shakespeare 3 quotes
“The passages of Shakespeare that we most prize were never quoted until within this century.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson on Thomas Carlyle 2 quotes
“As a literary artist he has great merits, beginning with the main one that he never wrote one dull line. How well-read, how adroit, what thousand arts in his one art of writing.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson on Emanuel Swedenborg 2 quotes
“His rare science and practical skill, and the added fame of second sight and extraordinary religious knowledge and gifts, drew to him queens, nobles, clergy, ship-masters and people about the ports through which he was wont to pass in his many voyages. The clergy interfered a little with the importation and publication of his religious works, but he seems to have kept the friendship of men in power. He was never married. He had great modesty and gentleness of bearing. His habits were simple; he lived on bread, milk and vegetables; he lived in a house situated in a large garden... He is described...as a man of a quiet, clerical habit, not averse to tea and coffee, and kind to children... A colossal soul, he lies vast abroad on his times, uncomprehended by them, and requires a long focal distance to be seen; suggests, as Aristotle, Bacon, Selden, & Humboldt, that a certain vastness of learning, or quasi omnipresence of the human soul in nature, is possible.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson on John Herschel
“What is there in Paradise Lost to elevate and astonish like Herschel or Somerville?”
Ralph Waldo Emerson on Edward Everett
“There was an influence on the young people from the genius of this eminent scholar which was almost comparable to that of Pericles in Athens.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson on Richard Arkwright
Ralph Waldo Emerson on John Brown (abolitionist)
Ralph Waldo Emerson on Moses
“Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.”
Quotes About Ralph Waldo Emerson
Gain deeper perspective through quotes about Ralph Waldo Emerson from others.
Charles Bradlaugh on Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fredrika Bremer on Ralph Waldo Emerson
“That which struck me most, as distinguishing him from most other human beings, is nobility. He is a born nobleman.”
James Elliot Cabot on Ralph Waldo Emerson
“It was a maxim with him that power is not so much shown in talent or in successful performance as in tone; the absolute or the victorious tone ... He disliked limitations, and welcomed whatever promised to get rid of them, without always inquiring very closely what was left when they were removed.”
Edwidge Danticat chapter on Ralph Waldo Emerson
“"We, as we read," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in an essay on history, "must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly."”
Frederick Douglass on Ralph Waldo Emerson
“England laughed at American authorship and we sent her Emerson...”
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion of Mexico were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists...Emerson supported territorial expansion at any cost but would have preferred it take place without war.”
George Gilfillan on Ralph Waldo Emerson
Herman Grimm on Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nathaniel Hawthorne on Ralph Waldo Emerson
“[A] great original thinker, who had his earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village. ... People that had lighted on a new thought or a thought that they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary.”
Henry James on Ralph Waldo Emerson 2 quotes
“[N]o one has had so steady and constant and above all so natural, a vision of what we require and what we are capable of in the way of aspiration and independence.”
Karl Kraus on Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Emerson: German philosophy that in crossing the great water took some on underway.”
Li-Young Lee on Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I love Emerson, I just had a problem with something I read in his journal. He was talking about Asians. Chinese, specifically. He said they had no culture to speak of, no music. He said they're not even as good as the Africans, who are at least willing to carry our wood. And he said that they've done nothing useful except manage "to preserve to a hair / for three or four thousand years / the ugliest features in the world." The poem begins by looking at the face of this butcher. So it's about that-it's about countenance, and it's about what the culture defines as beauty or ugliness. It's a weird wrestling I'm doing with Emerson. I can't imagine me without Emerson. And yet there's this thing about him that gets to me. That's deep in the culture.”
Disputed Quotes
Quotes attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson that are questionable.
Misattributed Quotes
Quotes mistakenly credited to Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting—a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.”
“To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”
“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
“No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing.”
About Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (25 May 1803 – 27 April 1882) was an American philosopher, essayist, and poet.