Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes - Page 4

The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship

Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest.

The South-wind brings
Life, sunshine and desire,
And on every mount and meadow
Breathes aromatic fire;
But over the dead he has no power,
The lost, the lost, he cannot restore;
And, looking over the hills, I mourn
The darling who shall not return.

Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool.

Even in the mud and scum of things, something always, always sings.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

If the single man plants himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abides, this huge world will come around to him.

Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.

Every word was once a poem.

Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.

The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.

Love what is simple and beautiful.
These are the essentials.

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.

Language is fossil Poetry.

Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.

It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem, - a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.

There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.

Poetry must be as new as foam, and as old as the rock.

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.