Ralph Waldo Emerson World Quotations

It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.

Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.

Everything in our world, even a drop of dew, is a microcosm of the universe.

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.

Neither you nor the world knows what you can do until you have tried.

Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.

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

Thoughts rule the world.

The moral sense is always supported by the permanent interest of the parties. Else, I know not how, in our world, any good would ever get done.

The world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh.

There will always be in society certain persons who are mercuries of its approbation, and whose glance will at any time determinefor the curious their standing in the world. These are the chamberlains of the lesser gods. Accept their coldness as an omen of grace with the loftier deities, and allow them all their privilege.

The world globes itself in a drop of dew.

Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.

A man is but a little thing in the midst of the objects of nature, yet, by the moral quality radiating from his countenance, he may abolish all considerations of magnitude, and in his manners equal the majesty of the world.

But when you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world.

The world when seen through a little child's eyes, greatly resembles paradise. Happiness is doing with a smile what you have to do anyway. This time, like all time, is a very good one if we but know what to do with it.

The universe is represented in every one of it's particles. Everything is made of one hidden stuff. The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The true doctrine of omnipresence is that God appears with all His parts in every moss and cobweb.

Our opinions of the world, are confessions of character.

The world exists for the education of each man.

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.

You have a place to live in this world which no other man can occupy; hence no competitors.

The way to mend the bad world is to create the right world.

Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world alters the world.

The world exists, as I understand it, to teach the science of liberty.

Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?

The world is so beautiful that I can hardly believe it exists.

Every burned book enlightens the world.

Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world; and beyond its world a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you: build, therefore, your own world.

Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is due to the triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it

God hid the whole world in thy heart.

We do not make a world of our own, but fall into institutions already made, and have to accommodate ourselves to them to be useful at all.

The finest poems of the world have been expedients to get bread.

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 world is always childish, and with each new gewgaw of a revolution or new constitution that it finds, thinks it shall never cry any more.

Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in the Lord's power, and learn that truth alone makes rich and great.

The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musican, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce.

I see that sensible men and conscientious men all over the world were of one religion of well-doing and daring.

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes.

Is it not better to intimate our astonishment as we pass through this world if it be only for a moment ere we are swallowed up in the yeast of the abyss? I will lift up my hands and say Kosmos.

The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome.

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

There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutual respect, until, in their dialogue, each stands for the whole world.

There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue.

Really, all things and persons are related to us, but according to our nature, they act on us not at once, but in succession, andwe are made aware of their presence one at a time. All persons, all things which we have known, are here present, and many more than we see; the world is full.

A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single.

Genius is the naturalist or geographer of the supersensible regions, and draws their map; and, by acquainting us with new fields of activity, cools our affection for the old. These are at once accepted as the reality, of which the world we have conversed with is the show.

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.

For the existing world is not a dream, and cannot with impunity be treated as a dream; neither is it a disease; but it is the ground on which you stand, it is the mother of whom you were born.

Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nordrove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery.

The population of the world is a conditional population; these are not the best, but the best that could live in the existing state of soils, gases, animals, and morals: the best that could yet live; there shall be a better, please God.

I--this thought which is called I--is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax.

Whilst all the world is in pursuit of power, culture corrects the theory of success.

Marriage (in what is called the spiritual world) is impossible, because of the inequality between every subject and every object.

Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread.

For nonconformity the world will whip you with its displeasure.

The world we live in is but thickened light.

Build therefore your own world.

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

Give me insight into today and you may have the antique and future worlds.

All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do.... Build, therefore, your own world.

Though we travel the world over to find beauty, we must carry it with us or we find it not . . . The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is a great difference in beholders.

All the world loves a lover.

Government has come to be a trade, and is managed solely on commercial principles. A man plunges into politics to make his fortune, and only cares that the world shall last his days.

The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.

The world is his who has money to go over it.

There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.

The mark of a man of the world is absence of pretension.

Moral qualities rule the world, but at short distances the senses are despotic.

The the illuminated mind the whole world sparkles with light.

In like manner the effect of every action is measured by the depth of the sentiment from which it proceeds. The great man knew not that he was great. It took a century or two for that fact to appear. What he did, he did, he did because he must; it was the most natural thing in the world, and grew out of the circumstances of the moment.

The shot heard round the world.

A man's personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.

If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it amused.

We walk alone in the world.

The greatest meliorator of the world is selfish, huckstering Trade.

Society, to be sure, does not like this very well; it saith, Whoso goes to walk alone, accuses the whole world; he declares all to be unfit to be his companions; it is very uncivil, nay, insulting; Society will retaliate.

The world is a divine dream, from which we may presently awake to the glories and certainties of day.

Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground.

In a virtuous action, I properly am; in a virtuous act, I add to the world; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing, and see the darkness receding on the limits of the horizon.

The world is all outside, it has no inside.

This book of Montaigne the world has endorsed by translating it into all tongues.

The world always had the same bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to us.

The world is full of judgment-days, and into every assembly that a man enters, in every action he attempts, he is gauged and stamped.

The world is his who can see through its pretension.

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.

The secret of the world is the tie between person and event. Person makes event and event person.

The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine.

Everything is prospective, and man is to live hereafter. That the world is for his education is the only sane solution of the enigma.

The ancestor of every action is thought; when we understand that we begin to comprehend that our world is governed by thought and that everything without had its counterpart originally within the mind.

A beautiful soul always dwells in a beautiful world.

It is greatest to believe and to hope well of the world, because he who does so, quits the world of experience, and makes the world he lives in.

For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.

I am present at the sowing of the seed of the world. With a geometry of sunbeams, the soul lays the foundations of nature.

A fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world.

When the spirit is not master of the world, then it is its dupe.

If you know you are right, stay the course even though the whole world seems to be against you and everyone you know questions your judgment. When you prevail--and you eventually will if you stick to the job--they will all tell you that they knew all along you could do it.

What is the hardest task in the world? To think.