Ralph Waldo Emerson Soul Quotations

Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.

What your heart thinks is great, is great. The soul's emphasis is always right.

The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul

The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by redemption of the soul.

The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.

The mass of men worry themselves into nameless graves while here and there a great unselfish soul forgets himself into immortality.

Each man, if he attempts to join himself to others, is on all sides cramped and diminished of his proportion; and the stricter theunion, the smaller and the more pitiful he is. But leave him alone, to recognize in every hour and place the secret soul, he will go up and down doing the works of a true member, and, to the astonishment of all, the work will be done with concert, though no man spoke.

The world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh.

In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present.

A healthy soul stands united with the Just and the True, as the magnet arranges itself with the pole, so that he stands to all beholders like a transparent object betwixt them and the sun, and whoso journeys towards the sun, journeys towards that person. He is thus the medium of the highest influence to all who are not on the same level.

Great conversation ... requires an absolute running of two souls into one.

So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.

No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair. Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All.

But we need not fear that we can lose any thing by the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to the end.

The soul is the perceiver and the revealer of truth.

A sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal powers, souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which can love us, and which we can love.

Go cherish your soul; express companions; set your habits to a life of solitude; then will the faculties rise fair and full within.

But only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience.

For every seeing soul, there are two absorbing facts - I, and the abyss.

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.

The powers of the Soul are commensurate with its needs.

Do you want to be a power in the world? Then be yourself. Be true to the highest within your soul and then allow yourself to be governed by no customs or conventionaliti es or arbitrary man-made rules that are not founded on principle.

It is one soul which animates all men.

The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires.

The Oversoul is before Time, and Time, Father of all else, is one of his children.

We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had with souls that made our souls wiser, that spoke what we thought, that told us what we knew, that gave us leave to be what we inly are.

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

Is not prayer a study of truth, a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness.

He that can heroically endure adversity will bear prosperity with equal greatest of the soul; for the mind that cannot be dejected by the former is not likely to be transported without the latter.

A strenuous soul hates cheap success. It is the ardor of the assailant that makes the vigor of the defendant.

The soul contains the event that shall befall it, for the event is only the actualization of its thoughts; and what we pray to ourselves for is always granted.

Souls are not saved in bundles.

When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful, and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are.

Nature never sends a great man into the planet, without confiding the secret to another soul.

It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterward return again.

Circles, like the soul, are neverending and turn round and round without a stop

None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed.

There the great Planter plants Of fruitful worlds the grain, And with a million spells enchants The souls that walk in pain.

To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul.

Every individual nature has its own beauty. One is struck in every company, at every fireside, with the riches of nature, when he hears so many new tones, all musical, sees in each person original manners, which have a proper and peculiar charm, and reads new expressions of face. He perceives that nature has laid for each the foundations of a divine building, if the soul will build thereon.

Men of God have always, from time to time, walked among men, and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer.

It is the fine souls who serve us, and not what is called fine society. Fine society is only a self-protection against the vulgarities of the street and the tavern.

The action of the soul is oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid than in that which is said in any conversation. It broods over every society, and men unconsciously seek for it in each other.

The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with objects immense and eternal.

The soul knows no persons.

There is a remedy for every wrong and a satisfaction for every soul.

The moment the doctrine of the immortality is separately taught, man is already fallen. In the flowing of love, in the adoration of humility, there is no question of continuance. No inspired man ever asks this question, or condescends to these evidences. For the soul is true to itself, and the man in whom it is shed abroad cannot wander from the present, which is infinite, to a future which would be finite.

The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul.

Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and worth he sees. The world is very empty, and is indebted to this gilding, exalting soul for all its pride.

The worst feature of this double consciousness is, that the two lives, of the understanding and of the soul, which we lead, reallyshow very little relation to each other; never meet and measure each other: one prevails now, all buzz and din; and the other prevails then, all infinitude and paradise; and, with the progress of life, the two discover no greater disposition to reconcile themselves.

Of lower states, of acts of routine and sense, we can tell somewhat; but the masterpieces of God, the total growths and universalmovements of the soul, he hideth; they are incalculable. I can know that truth is divine and helpful; but how it shall help me I can have no guess, for so to be is the sole inlet of so to know.

The universe is the externisation of the soul. Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore superficial. The earth, and the heavenly bodies, physics, and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if they were self-existent; but these are the retinue of that Being we have.

The customer is the immediate jewel of our souls. Him we flatter, him we feast, compliment, vote for, and will not contradict.

Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole.

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.

Jesus and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His virtue,--is not that mine? His wit,--if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.

The soul answers never by words, but by the thing itself that is inquired after.

The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant's economy is a coarse symbol of the soul's economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure.

When he has seen, that it is not his, nor any man's, but it is the soul which made the world, and that it is all accessible to him, he will know that he, as its minister, may rightfully hold all things subordinate and answerable to it.

Of immortality, the soul, when well employed, is incurious. It is so well, that it is sure that it will be well. It asks no questions of the Supreme Power.

There is no great and no small To the Soul that maketh all.

If you believe in the soul, do not clutch at sensual sweetness before it is ripe on the slow tree of cause and effect.

The Soul rules over matter. Matter may pass away like a mote in the sunbeam, may be absorbed into the immensity of God, as a mistis absorbed into the heat of the Sun--but the soul is the kingdom of God, the abode of love, of truth, of virtue.

That for which Paul lived and died so gloriously; that for which Jesus gave himself to be crucified; the end that animated the thousand martyrs and heroes who have followed his steps, was to redeem us from a formal religion, and teach us to seek our well-being in the formation of the soul.

All reform aims, in some one particular, to let the soul have its way through us; in other words, to engage us to obey.

The soul circumscribes all things.

The soul knows only the soul; the web of events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed.

The energetic action of the times develops individualism, and the religious appear isolated. I esteem this a step in the right direction. Heaven deals with us on no representative system. Souls are not saved in bundles.

For, rightly, every man is a channel through which heaven floweth, and, whilst I fancied I was criticising him, I was censuring orrather terminating my own soul.

A strenuous soul hates cheap success.

He who would be a great soul in the future, must be a great soul now.

Within us is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, the eternal One.

Beauty is the virtue of the body as virtue is the beauty of the soul

Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.

Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.

There is more in every person's soul than we think.

That which befits us, embosomed in beauty and wonder as we are, is cheerfulness, and courage, and the endeavor to realize our aspirations. Shall not the heart which has received so much, trust the Power by which it lives? May it not quit other leadings, and listen to the Soul that has guided it so gently, and taught it so much, secure that the future will be worthy of the past?

Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfillments; each of its joys ripens into a new want.

The passive master lent his hand, To the vast Soul which o'er him planned.

The soul refuses limits and always affirms an optimism, never a pessimism.

The soul is not born; it does not die; it was not produced from anyone… Unborn, eternal, it is not slain, though the body is slain.

Higher than the question of our duration is the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he would be a great soul in future must be a great soul now.

The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men.

Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul.

The universal soul is the alone creator of the useful and the beautiful; therefore to make anything useful or beautiful, the individual must be submitted to the universal mind.

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps.

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

It all begins when the soul would have its way with you.

Talent finds its models, methods, and ends in society, exists for exhibition, and goes to the soul only for power to work. Genius is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture from within.

Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.

Excite the soul, and the weather and the town and your condition in the world all disappear; the world itself loses its solidity, nothing remains but the soul and the Divine Presence in which it lives.

We must not tamper with the organic motion of the soul.

[D]ivine Providence... keeps the universe open in every direction to the soul...

Wait, and thy soul shall speak.

The universe is the externalization of the soul.

A beautiful soul always dwells in a beautiful world.

Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel, was never opened; there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every man believes that he has a greater possibility.