Ralph Waldo Emerson Perception Quotations

Do you love me? Means at last do you see the same truth I see? If you do, we are happy together; but when presently one of us passes into the perception of a new truth, we are divorced and the force of all nature cannot hold us to each other.

How can we speak of the action of the mind under any divisions, as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so forth, since it melts will into perception, knowledge into act? Each becomes the other. Itself alone is.

Defect in manners is usually the defect of fine perceptions. Elegance comes of no breeding, but of birth.

No man has a right perception of any truth, who has not been reacted on by it, so as to be ready to be its martyr.

The cure for false theology is motherwit. Forget your books and traditions, and obey your moral perceptions at this hour.

Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.

The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men.

The great make its feel, first of all, the indifference of circumstances. They call into activity the higher perceptions, and subdue the low habits of comfort and luxury; but the higher perceptions find their objects everywhere; only the low habits need palaces and banquets.

We imperatively require a perception of and a homage to beauty in our companions. Other virtues are in request in the field and workyard, but a certain degree of taste is not to be spared in those we sit with.

The senses interfere everywhere, and mix their own structure with all they report of.

Who heeds the waste abyss of possibility? The ocean is everywhere the same, but it has no character until seen with the shore or the ship.

Since everything in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is that the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.

My life is superficial, takes no root in the deep world; I ask, When shall I die, and be relieved of the responsibility of seeinga Universe which I do not use? I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning faith for continuous daylight, this fever-glow for a benign climate.

Do what you know and perception is converted into character.

Science corrects the old creeds, sweeps away, with every new perception, our infantile catechisms, and necessitates a faith commensurate with the grander orbits and universal laws which it discloses yet it does not surprise the moral sentiment that was older and awaited expectant these larger insights.

Perception is a mirror not a fact. And what I look on is my state of mind, reflected outward.