Ralph Waldo Emerson Love Quotations

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.

There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

Thou art to me a delicious torment.

If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me.

A mind might ponder its thought for an epoch, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach in a day.

Go forth into the busy world and love it. Interest yourself in its life, mingle kindly with its joys and sorrows.

Give all to love; Obey thy heart....

Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws.

Dear to us are those who love us... but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.

Every man has a choice between love of truth and love of repose. Love of repose brings him a solid reputation and peaceful life; love of truth keeps him in suspense. A man who loves truth respects the highest law of his being.

I like my boy with his endless sweet soliloquies and iterations and his utter inability to conceive why I should not leave all my nonsense, business, and writing and come to tie up his toy horse, as if there was or could be any end to nature beyond his horse. And he is wiser than we when [he] threatens his whole threat "I will not love you."

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

I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself anylonger for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall bethe happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that youshould. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust thatwhat is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moonwhatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. If you are noble, Iwill love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself byhypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truthwith me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own.

Your work should be in praise of what you love.

Love is the essence of God....

Love is like wildflowers; It's often found in the most unlikely places.

Love, and you shall be loved.

A man is a little thing while he works by and for himself; but when he gives voice to the rules of love and justice, he is godlike....

All mankind love a lover.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to leave the world a better place, to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, this is to have succeeded.

Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as two sides of an algebraic equation.

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

Let him be great, and love shall follow him.

Love is the bright foreigner, the foreign self.

No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love.

The lover is made happier by his love than the object of his affection.

The affirmative of affirmatives... is love.

Beauty brings its own fancy price, for all that a man hath will he give for his love.

If with love thy heart has burned; If thy love is unreturned; Hide thy grief within thy breast, Though it tear thee unexpressed; For when love has once departed From the eyes of the false-hearted, And one by one has torn off quite The bandages of purple light; Though thou wert the loveliest Form the soul had ever dressed, Thou shalt seem, in each reply, A vixen to his altered eye; Thy softest pleadings seem too bold, Thy praying lute will seem to scold; Though thou kept the straightest road, Yet thou errest far and broad.

The lover of letters loves power too.

The Greek epigram intimates that the force of love is not shown by the courting of beauty, but where the like desire is inflamed for one who is ill-favored.

In the true mythology, Love is an immortal child, and Beauty leads him as a guide; nor can we express a deeper sense than when we say, Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.

Self-love is, in almost all men, such an over-weight that they are incredulous of a man's habitual preference of the general good to his own; but when they see it proved by sacrifices of ease, wealth, rank, and of life itself, there is no limit to their admiration.

Test of the poet is knowledge of love, For Eros is older than Saturn or Jove; Never was poet, of late or of yore, Who was not tremulous with love-lore.

In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of a man's own worthiness from other men.

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

I have been told, that in some public discourses of mine my reverence for the intellect has made me unjustly cold to the personalrelations. But now I almost shrink at the remembrance of such disparaging words. For persons are love's world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the young soul wandering here in nature to the power of love, without being tempted to unsay, as treasonable to nature, aught derogatory to the social instincts.

Lovers should guard their strangeness. If they forgive too much, all slides into confusion and meanness.

We must be lovers, and at once the impossible becomes possible.

I have heard that whoever loves is in no condition old. I have heard that whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is announced; it cleaves to his constitution. The mode of it baffles our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the other side. But the inference from the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving skill,--at the end of life just ready to be born,--affirms the inspirations of affection and of the moral sentiment.

We love force and we care very little how it is exhibited.

A deep man believes that the evil eye can whither, the heart's blessing can heal, and that love can overcome all odds....

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.

I have heard that whoever loves is in no condition old.

All the world loves a lover.

Marriage is the perfection which love aimed at, ignorant of what it sought.

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

The dice of God are always loaded.

We put our love where we have put our labor.

Love is our highest word and the synonym for God.

The reason why all men honor love is because it looks up, and not down; aspires and not despairs.

Never self-possessed, or prudent, love is all abandonment.

Let us be poised, wise and our own today.

We say love is blind, and the figure of Cupid is drawn with a bandage around his eyes. Blind - yes, because he does not see what he does not like; but the sharpest-sighted hunter in the universe is Love for finding what he seeks, and only that.

The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed.

Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.

Hospitality consists in a little fire, a little food, and an immense quiet

Perhaps love is only the highest symbol of friendship, as all other things seem symbols of love.

The effect of the indulgence of human affection is a certain cordial exhilaration.

Love is like a hunter, who cares not for the game when once caught, which he may have pursued with the most intense and breathless eagerness. Love is strongest in pursuit; friendship in possession....

Let him be great, and love shall follow him. Nothing is more deeply punished than the neglect of the affinities by which alone society should be formed, and the insane levity of choosing associates by others eyes.

In the sublimest flights of the soul, rectitude is never surmounted, love is never outgrown.

Though love repine, and reason chafe, There came a voice without reply,- "'Tis man's perdition to be safe, When for the truth he ought to die."

He in whom the love of truth predominates . . . submits to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion; but he is a candidate for truth . . . and respects the highest law of his being.

Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see - not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.

Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it well and serenely

In strict science, all persons underlie the same condition of an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love by mining forthe metaphysical foundation of this elysian temple? Shall I not be as real as the things I see? If I am, I shall not fear to know them for what they are.

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.

Make yourself necessary to somebody.