Quotes By Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The years teach much the days never know.”

“The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.”

“Me too thy nobleness has taughtTo master my despair;The fountains of my hidden lifeAre through thy friendship fair.”

“The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.”

“There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.”

“All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.”

“Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams”

“Language is fossil Poetry.”

“The South-wind bringsLife, sunshine and desire,And on every mount and meadowBreathes aromatic fire;But over the dead he has no power,The lost, the lost, he cannot restore;And, looking over the hills, I mournThe darling who shall not return.”

“Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.”

“The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.”

“His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong”

“If the single man plants himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abides, this huge world will come around to him.”

“A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.”

“The secret of poetry is never explained – is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, & the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, & knows not that they are such. ‘Tis as easy as breath. ‘Tis like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, & none knows what it is.”