Learning Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes & Sayings

I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions. "In the morning, - solitude;" said Pythagoras; that Nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company, and that her favorite may make acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to serious and abstracted thought. 'Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to time as benefactors: and the wise instructor will press this point of securing to the young soul in the disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and habits of solitude. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A world in the hand is worth two in the bush. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The years teach us much, which the days never knew. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, anecdote, and all flock to their aid. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Excellence is the new forever. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is creative reading as well as creative writing. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The book written against fame and learning has the author's name on the title-page. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The poet discovers that what men value as substances have a higher value as symbols; that Nature is the immense shadow of man. A man's action is only a picture-book of his creed. He does after what he believes. Your condition, your employment, is the fable of you. The world is thoroughly anthropomorphized, as if it had passed through the body and mind of man, and taken his mould and form. Indeed, good poetry is always personification, and heightens every species of force in nature by giving it a human volition. We are advertised that there is nothing to which man is not related; that everything is convertible into every other. The staff in his hand is the radius vector of the sun. The chemistry of this is the chemistry of that. Whatever one act we do, whatever one thing we learn, we are doing and learning all things, - marching in the direction of universal power. Every healthy mind is a true Alexander or Sesostris, building a universal monarchy. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

That which we are, we shall teach, not voluntarily, but involuntarily. Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Knowledge exists to be imparted. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The proof of a high education is the ability to speak about complex matters as simply as possible. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let the bird sing without deciphering the song. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Conversation is the laboratory and workshop of the student. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

This very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole subject we study and learn. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst ... They are for nothing but to inspire. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature will not let us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds andwars. When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the abolition-convention, or the temperance-meeting, or the transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she says to us, so hot? my little Sir. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Eyes are bold as lions,
roving, running, leaping, here and there, far and near. They speak all languages. They wait for no introduction; they are no Englishmen; ask no leave of age or rank; they respect neither property nor riches, neither learning nor power, nor virtue, nor sex, but intrude, and come again, and go through and through you in a moment of time. What inundation of life and thought is discharged from one soul into another through them! — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions, that around us arerushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The secret in education lies in respecting the student. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Throughout the ages there have always been those who have been willing to go beyond the norms and reach for that unknown and distant star. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The man (or woman) who can make hard things easy is the educator. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men's minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Each mind has its own method. A true man never acquires after college rules. — Ralph Waldo Emerson