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When we attempt to define and describe god, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages.

Ralph Waldo Emerson - Essayist, 1803-1882

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Other Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art, in the artist, is proportion, or, a habitual respect to the whole by an eye loving beauty in details. And the wonder and charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it denotes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Conversation is a game of circles.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the heroic or homeric age down to the domestic life of the athenians and spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a grecian period.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Words are finite expressions of the infinite mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The most attractive class of people are those who are powerful obliquely, and not by the direct stroke: men of genius, but not yetaccredited: one gets the cheer of their light, without paying too great a tax.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, and go as brave as the zodiac.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We put our love where we have put our labor.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The health of the eye demands a horizon.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The most useful man in the most useful world, so long as only commodity was served, would remain unsatisfied. But, as fast as he sees beauty, life acquires a very high value.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emancipation is the demand of civilization. That is a principle; everything else is an intrigue.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The same, the same: friend and foe are of one stuff; the ploughman, the plough, and the furrow, are of one stuff; and the stuff is such, and so much, that the variations of form are unimportant.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he god; the safety of god, the immortality of god, the majesty of god do enter into that man with justice.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Cities of mortals woe-begone fantastic care derides, but in the serious landscape lone stern benefit abides.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Honor and fortune exist for him who always recognizes the neighborhood of the great, always feels himself in the presence of high causes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Manners are very communicable: men catch them from each other.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do not you see that every misfortune is misconduct; that every honour is desert; that every effort is an insolence of your own?...You carry your fortune in your own hand.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To be able to discern that what is true is true, and that what is false is false,--this is the mark and character of intelligence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish,--and that makes the offensiveness of the class. They are partial; they are notequal to the work they pretend. They lose their way; in the assault on the kingdom of darkness, they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I find nothing healthful or exalting in the smooth conventions of society. I do not like the close air of saloons. I begin to suspect myself to be a prisoner, though treated with all this courtesy and luxury. I pay a destructive tax in my conformity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson