Ralph Waldo Emerson Power Quotations

A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

Do the thing and you will be given the power

Don't trust man, great God, with more power than he has, until he has learned to use that little better

The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a gingerbread dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame, by all these attitudes and exertions --an end of the first importance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own.

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.

Vigor is contagious, and whatever makes us either think or feel strongly adds to our power and enlarges our field of action.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.

These arts open great gates of a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life out of its beggary to a god- like ease and power.

Railroad iron is a magician's rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.

Do the thing and you will have the power.

The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.

You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.

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

All power is of one kind, a sharing of the nature of the world. The mind that is parallel with the laws of nature will be in the current of events, and strong with their strength.

Life is a search after power; and this is an element with which the world is so saturated,-there is no chink or crevice in which it is not lodged,-that no honest seeking goes unrewarded.

The lover of letters loves power too.

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

The people know that they need in their representative much more than talent, namely, the power to make his talent trusted.

A man is the prisoner of his power. A topical memory makes him an almanac; a talent for debate, disputant; skill to get money makes him a miser, that is, a beggar. Culture reduces these inflammations by invoking the aid of other powers against the dominant talent, and by appealing to the rank of powers. It watches success.

Knowledge, Virtue, Power are the victories of man over his necessities, his march to the dominion of the world.

There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself.

Wherever there is power, there is age. Don't be deceived by dimples and curls. I tell you that babe is a thousand years old.

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.

He only is a well-made man who has a good determination. And the end of culture is not to destroy this, God forbid! but to train away all impediment and mixture and leave nothing but pure power.

You think me the child of circumstance; I make my circumstance.

The household is a school of power. There, within the door, learn the tragi-comedy of human life.

Success goes thus invariably with a certain plus or positive power: an ounce of power must balance an ounce of weight.

The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.

Don't trust children with edge tools. Don't trust man, great God, with more power than he has until he has learned to use that little better. What a hell we should make of the world if we could do what we would!

Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.

Wherever there is power there is age.

Power educates the potentate.

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

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.

Valor consists in the power of self recovery.

All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.

Talent for talent's sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.

Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.

Every natural power exhilarates; a true talent delights the possessor first.

Power is the first good.

Coal lay in ledges under the ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the surface. We may well call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate.

The power of a man increases steadily by continuing in one direction.

Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and power because it is as good as money.

All the elements, whose aid man calls in, will sometimes become big masters.

Power obeys reality, and not appearances; power is according to quality, and not quantity.

We do not yet trust the unknown power of thoughts.