Beauty Emerson Quotes & Sayings

There comes a period of the imagination to each
a later youth
the power of beauty, the power of looks, of poetry. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

We imperatively require a perception of and a homage to beauty in our companions. Other virtues are in request in the field and workyard, but a certain degree of taste is not to be spared in those we sit with. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Within us is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, the eternal One. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

He thought it happier to be dead, To die for Beauty, than live for bread — Ralph Waldo Emerson

For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear under different names in every system of thought, whether they be called cause, operation and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit and the Son; but which we will call here the Knower, the Doer and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty. These three are equal. Each is that which he is, essentially, so that he cannot be surmounted or analyzed, and each of these three has the power of the others latent in him and his own, patent. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without place to insert an atom
in graceful succession, in equal fullness, in balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and boundless. It will not be dissected, nor unraveled, nor shown. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue. Every natural action is graceful; every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

To laugh often and love much ... to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to give one's self ... this is to have succeeded. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, 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

Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I want, but not news nor pottage. I can get politics, and chat, and neighborly conveniences from cheaper companions. Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal, and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass that divides the brook? Let us not vilify, bur raise it to that standard. That great, defying eye, that scornful beauty of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather fortify and enhance. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature cannot be surprised in undress. Beauty breaks in everywhere. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The landscape belongs to the person who looks at it ... -Ralph Waldo Emerson — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,
for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace; he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the universe. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Each moment of the year has its own beauty — Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are faces so fluid with expression, so flushed and rippled by the play of thought, that we can hardly find what the mere features really are. When the delicious beauty of lineament loses its power, it is because a more delicious beauty has appeared, that an interior and durable form has been disclosed. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Greek epigram intimates that the force of love is not shown by the courting of beauty, but where the like desire is inflamed for one who is ill-favored. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

There can be no excess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

That you are fair or wise is vain,
Or strong, or rich, or generous;
You must have also the untaught strain
That sheds beauty on the rose. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty is its own excuse for being. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

And yet
it is not beauty that inspires the deepest passion. Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait. Beauty, without expression, tires. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

So in writing, there is always a right word, and every other than that is wrong. There is no beauty in words except in their collocation. The effect of a fanciful word misplaced, is like that of a horn of exquisite polish growing on a human head. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty is the virtue of the body as virtue is the beauty of the soul — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Culture opens the sense of beauty. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty brings its own fancy price, for all that a man hath will he give for his love. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

This love of beauty is Taste. Others have the same love in such excess, that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is art. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The hand that rounded Peter's dome, And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, Wrought in a sad sincerity; Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew: The conscious stone to beauty grew. — 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

Religion must always be a crab fruit; it cannot be grafted, and keep its wild beauty. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful. — 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

Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same fields, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

This is my wish for you: Comfort on difficult days, smiles when sadness intrudes, rainbows to follow the clouds, laughter to kiss your lips, sunsets to warm your heart, hugs when spirits sag, beauty for your eyes to see, friendships to brighten your being, faith so that you can believe, confidence for when you doubt, courage to know yourself, patience to accept the truth, Love to complete your life. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

For, whom the Muses smile upon,
And touch with soft persuasion,
His words like a storm-wind can bring
Terror and beauty on their wing;
In his every syllable
Lurketh nature veritable. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is the same among the men and women, as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is it, that beauty can never be grasped? In persons and in landscape is equally inaccessible? — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The highest Beauty should be plain set. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Accuracy is essential to beauty. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

All high beauty has a moral element in it. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics or practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers' hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows in poverty, necessity and darkness. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thy dangerous glances
make women of men;
new-born, we are melting
into nature again. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Moller, in his Essay on Architecture, taught that the building which was fitted accurately to answer its end would turn out to be beautiful, though beauty had not been intended. I find the like unity in human structures rather virulent and pervasive. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Never lose an opportunity for seeing something beautiful for beauty is God s handwriting. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The delicious faces of children, the beauty of school-girls, "the sweet seriousness of sixteen," the lofty air of well-born, well-bred boys, the passionate histories in the looks and manners of youth and early manhood, and the varied power in all that well-known company that escort us through life,
we know how these forms thrill, paralyze, provoke, inspire, and enlarge us. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty is the pilot of the young soul. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We call the beautiful the highest, because it appears to us the golden mean, escaping the dowdiness of the good and the heartlessness of the true. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

It does not hurt weak eyes to look into beautiful eyes never so long. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

by knowledge the privilege to BE! His insight refines him. The beauty of nature shines in his own breast. Man is greater that he can see this, and the universe less, because Time and Space relations vanish as laws are known. Here again we are impressed and even daunted by the immense Universe to be explored. "What we know, is a point to what we do not know." Open any recent journal of science, and weigh the problems suggested concerning Light, Heat, Electricity, Magnetism, Physiology, Geology, and judge whether the interest of natural science is likely to be soon exhausted. Passing by many particulars of the discipline of nature, we must not omit to specify two. The exercise of the Will or the — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The line of beauty is the line of perfect economy. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

For beauty is God's handwriting ... A nd, thank God for it as a cup of His blessing. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Who gave thee, O Beauty,
The keys of this breast,
Too credulous lover
Of blest and unblest?
Say, when in lapsed ages
Thee knew I of old?
Or what was the service
For which I was sold? — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Never miss an opportunity of noticing anything of beauty ... — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who ever could clutch it? — Ralph Waldo Emerson

All writing is by the grace of God. People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad. In these sentences that you show me, I can find no beauty, for I see death in every clause and every word. There is a fossil or a mummy character which pervades this book. The best sepulchers, the vastest catacombs, Thebes and Cairo, Pyramids, are sepulchers to me. I like gardens and nurseries. Give me initiative, spermatic, prophesying, man-making words. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

As we grow old...the beauty steals inward. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

It's okay to be addicted to beauty," Mom says, all dreamy. "Emerson said 'beauty is God's handwriting. — Jandy Nelson

The day's passage was by Ralph Waldo Emerson. It read: 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? — Will Schwalbe

A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

So when the soul of the poet has come to ripeness of thought, she detaches and sends away from it its poems or songs, - a fearless, sleepless, deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents of the weary kingdom of time: a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with wings (such was the virtue of the soul out of which they came), which carry them fast and far, and infix them irrecoverably into the hearts of men. These wings are the beauty of the poet's soul. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

When the act of reflection takes place in the mind, when we look at ourselves in the light of thought, we discover that our life is embosomed in beauty. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We spend our incomes for paint and paper, for a hundred trifles, I know not what, and not for the things of a man. Our expense is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we run in debt; 't is not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, not worship, that costs so much. Why needs any man be rich? Why must he have horses, fine garments, handsome apartments, access to public houses, and places of amusement? Only for want of thought. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A beautiful person among the Greeks, was thought to betray by this sign some secret favor of the immortal gods; and we can pardonpride, when a woman possesses such a figure that wherever she stands, or moves, or leaves a shadow on the wall, or sits for a portrait to the artist, she confers a favor on the world. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Divinity is not something supernatural that ever and again invades the natural order in a crashing miracle. Divinity is not in some remote heaven, seated on a throne. Divinity is love ... Wherever goodness, beauty, truth, love, are-there is the divine. — Harry Emerson Fosdick

WHOEVER considers the final cause of the world, will discern a multitude of uses that result. They all admit of being thrown into one of the following classes; Commodity; Beauty; Language; and Discipline. Under the general name of Commodity, I rank all those advantages which our senses owe to nature. This, of course, is a benefit which is temporary and mediate, not — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Don't be a cynic, and bewail and bemoan. Omit the negative propositions. Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good. Set down nothing that will help somebody. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

As the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful. And the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath, like space and time, make all matter gay. Even the corpse has its own beauty. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing is arbitrary, nothing is insulated in beauty. It depends forever on the necessary and the useful. The plumage of the bird, the mimic plumage of the insect, has a reason for its rich colors in the constitution of the animal. Fitness is so inseparable an accompaniment of beauty, that it, has been taken for it. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded. - RALPH WALDO EMERSON — Lama Surya Das

I do not wonder at a snowflake, a shell, a summer landscape, or the glory of the stars; but at the necessity of beauty under which the universe lies. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We live in succession, in division, in parts and particles. Meantime, within man, is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom anpther's folly. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are immensed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Without the great arts which speak to the sense of beauty, a man seems to me a poor, naked, shivering creature. These are his becoming draperies, which warm and adorn him. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The moral sense reappears today with the same morning newness that has been from of old the fountain of beauty and strength. You say there is no religion now. 'Tis like saying in rainy weather, There is no sun, when at that moment we are witnessing one of its superlative effects. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The beautiful is never plentiful. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good. — Ralph Waldo Emerson