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The Complete Works of
Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Centenary Edition)

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RWE Random Quotes

Money is the representative of a certain quantity of corn or other commodity. It is so much warmth, so much bread.The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes:

RWE Random Quotes
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The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature.

"The rabble at Washington are really better than the snivelling opposition. They have a sort of genius of a bold and manly cast, though Satanic. They see, against the unanimous expression of the people, how much crime the people will hear, and they proceed from step to step."
(Emerson's journal for 1846) offered by Richard Geldard
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"Philosopher, poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson helped define US identity in the 19th century. Today, 200 years after his birth, his views on power, rejection of Old Europe and belief in a personal god are even more influential, pervading American culture and politics, argues..."
Harold Bloom in The Guardian offered by Richard Geldard
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"When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart."
(Journal, Dec. 1824, age 21) offered by Richard Geldard
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"For a sense of how Emerson's spirit is alive in these times of war and peace, consider RWE's War Address."

Quotes from Emerson
Miscellaneous

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

	Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
	Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry.
	A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.
	The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.
	Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.
	All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
	"Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events."
	"Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong is against it."
	"I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, then that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding."
	"Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself."
	"Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done single will justify you now."
	"The force of character is cumulative."
	"He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession', for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances."
	"Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles."

Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor’s creed has lent.
All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone.

Each and All.

I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore,
With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.

Each and All.

I like a church; I like a cowl;
I like a prophet of the soul;
And on my heart monastic aisles
Fall like sweet strains or pensive smiles:
Yet not for all his faith can see
Would I that cowléd churchman be.

The Problem.

Not from a vain or shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought.

The Problem.

Out from the heart of Nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old.

The Problem.

The hand that rounded Peter’s dome,
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,
Wrought in a sad sincerity;
Himself from God he could not free;
He builded better than he knew:
The conscious stone to beauty grew.

The Problem.

Earth proudly wears the Parthenon
As the best gem upon her zone.

The Problem.

Earth laughs in flowers to see her boastful boys
Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs;
Who steer the plough, but can not steer their feet
Clear of the grave.

Hamatreya.

Good bye, proud world! I’m going home;
Thou art not my friend; I am not thine.

Good Bye.

For what are they all in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet?

Good Bye.

If eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.

The Rhodora.

Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind.

Ode, inscribed to W. H. Channing.

    Olympian bards who sung
  Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young
  And always keep us so.

Ode to Beauty.

Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.

Give all to Love.

Love not the flower they pluck and know it not,
And all their botany is Latin names.

Blight.

The silent organ loudest chants
The master’s requiem.

Dirge.

    By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
  Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
  And fired the shot heard round the world.

Hymn sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument.

What potent blood hath modest May!

May-Day.

And striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.

May-Day.

And every man, in love or pride,
Of his fate is ever wide.

Nemesis.

None shall rule but the humble,
And none but Toil shall have.

Boston Hymn. 1863.

Oh, tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire.

Ode, Concord, July 4, 1857.

Go put your creed into your deed,
Nor speak with double tongue.

Ode, Concord, July 4, 1857.

    So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
  So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
  The youth replies, I can!

Voluntaries.

Whoever fights, whoever falls,
Justice conquers evermore.

Voluntaries.

Nor sequent centuries could hit
Orbit and sum of Shakespeare’s wit.

Solution.

Born for success he seemed,
With grace to win, with heart to hold,
With shining gifts that took all eyes.

In Memoriam.

Nor mourn the unalterable Days
That Genius goes and Folly stays.

In Memoriam.

Fear not, then, thou child infirm;
There’s no god dare wrong a worm.

Compensation.

He thought it happier to be dead,
To die for Beauty, than live for bread.

Beauty.

Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill?
Pay every debt, as if God wrote the bill!

Suum Cuique.

Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die.

Quatrains. Nature.

    Though love repine, and reason chafe,
  There came a voice without reply,—
“’T is man’s perdition to be safe
  When for the truth he ought to die.”

Sacrifice.

For what avail the plough or sail,
Or land or life, if freedom fail?

Boston.

    If the red slayer think he slays,
  Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
  I keep and pass and turn again.

Brahma.

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

Wood-notes.

Seeing only what is fair,
Sipping only what is sweet,
Thou dost mock at fate and care.

To the humble Bee.

Thou animated torrid-zone.

To the humble Bee.

In the vaunted works of Art
The master-stroke is Nature’s part.

Art.

If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.

Nature. Addresses and Lectures. The American Scholar.

    There is no great and no small
  To the Soul that maketh all;
And where it cometh, all things are;
  And it cometh everywhere.

Essays. First Series. Epigraph to History.

Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.

Essays. First Series. History.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

Essays. First Series. History.

A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.

Essays. First Series. History.

The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.