Quotes & Sayings About Nature Ralph Waldo Emerson

In private places, among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its cradle. Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal greatness. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Astronomy taught us our insignificance in Nature. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature hates calculators. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature is no sentimentalist, - does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The visible heavens and earth sympathize with Jesus. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everything in nature is bipolar, or has a positive and a negative pole. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

History is the action and reaction of these two, nature and thought. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

An eye can threaten like a loaded and levelled gun, or it can insult like hissing or kicking; or, in its altered mood, by beams of kindness, it can make the heart dance for joy. ... One of the most wonderful things in nature is a glance of the eye; it transcends speech; it is the bodily symbol of identity. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am ready to die out of nature, and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

This knot of nature is so well tied that nobody was ever cunning enough to find the two ends. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each other's hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

By fate, not option, frugal Nature gave One scent to hyson and to wall-flower, One sound to pine-groves and to water-falls, One aspect to the desert and the lake. It was her stern necessity : all things Are of one pattern made; bird, beast, and flower, Song, picture, form, space, thought, and character Deceive us, seeming to be many things, And are but one. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The lover seeks in marriage his private felicity and perfection, with no prospective end; and nature hides in his happiness her own ends, namely, progeny, or the perpetuity of the race. — 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

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature does not cocker us: we are children, not pets: she is not fond: everything is dealt to us without fear or favor, after severe universal laws. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature is the symbol of Spirit. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards, we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions - objects, successively tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself and whatever science or art or course of action he engages in reacts upon and illuminates the recesses of his own mind. Thus friends seem to be only mirrors to draw out and explain to us ourselves; and that which draws us nearer our fellow man, is, that the deep Heart in one, answers the deep Heart in another,
that we find we have (a common Nature)
one life which runs through all individuals, and which is indeed Divine. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Drive out Nature with a fork, she comes running back. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the 'Not Me,' that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, 'Nature.' — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I cannot often enough say, that a man is only a relative and representative nature. Each is a hint of the truth, but far enough from being that truth, which yet he quite newly and inevitably suggests to us. If I seek it in him, I shall not find it. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

That law of nature whereby everything climbs to higher platforms, and bodily vigor becomes mental and moral vigor. The bread he eats is first strength and animal spirits; it becomes, in higher laboratories, imagery and thought; and in still higher results, courage and endurance. This is the right compound interest; this is capital doubled, quadrupled, centupled; man raised to his highest power. The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritual creation and not in augmenting animal existence. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The craft with which the world is made runs also into the mind and character of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which Nature has taken to heart. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature is a tropical swamp in sunshine, on whose purlieus we hear the song of summer birds, and see prismatic dewdrops, - but her interiors are terrific, full of hydras and crocodiles. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

If in the least particular, one could derange the order of nature, who would accept the gift of life? — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

You cannot have a deep sympathy with both man & nature. Those qualities which bring you near to the one estrange you from the other. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him? — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

THE POET A moody child and wildly wise Pursued the game with joyful eyes, Which chose, like meteors, their way, And rived the dark with private ray: They overleapt the horizon's edge, Searched with Apollo's privilege; Through man, and woman, and sea, and star, Saw the dance of nature forward far; Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times, Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes. Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us young, And always keep us so. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

In all conversation between two persons, tacit reference is made, as to a third party, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is not social; it is impersonal; is God. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

If we consider what happens in conversation, in reveries, in remorse, in times of passion, in surprises, in the instructions of dreams, wherein often we see ourselves in masquerade,
the droll disguises only magnifying and enhancing a real element, and forcing it on our distinct notice,
we shall catch many hints that will broaden and lighten into knowledge of the secret of nature. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy. A fop of fields is no better than his brother on Broadway. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hidden away in the inner nature of the real man is the law of his life, and someday he will discover it and consciously make use of it. He will heal himself, make himself happy and prosperous, and life in an entirely different world. For he will have discovered that life is from within and not from without. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Egotism is a kind of buckram that gives momentary strength and concentration to men, and seems to be much used in Nature for fabrics in which local and spasmodic energy is required. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and second secrets of nature: Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dreams and beasts are two keys by which we find ou the secret of our own nature. They are test objects. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Money is representative, and follows the nature and fortunes of the owner...The farmer is covetous of his dollar, and with reason. It is no waif to him. He knows how many strokes of labor it represents. His bones ache with the days' work that earned it. He knows how much land it represents - how much rain, frost and sunshine. He knows that, in the dollar, he gives you so much discretion and patience, so much hoeing and threshing. Try to lift his dollar; you must lift all that weight. In the city, where money follows the skit of a pen or a lucky rise in exchange, it comes to be looked on as light. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We early arrive at the great discovery that there is one mind common to all individual men: that what is individual is less than what is universalthat error, vice and disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature and books belong to all who see them. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I thought as I rode in the cold pleasant light of Sunday morning how silent & passive nature offers, every morn, her wealth to man; she is immensely rich, he is welcome to her entire goods, which he speaks no word, only leaves over doors ajar, hall, store room, & cellar. He may do as he will: if he takes her hint & uses her goods, she speaks no word; if he blunders & starves, she says nothing. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men of sense esteem wealth to be the assimilation of nature to themselves, the converting of the sap and juices of the planet to the incarnation and nutriment of their design. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

We live in a system of approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary; a round and final success nowhere. We are encamped in nature, not domesticated. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history isto be read and written. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love not the flower they pluck and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

That which we persist on doing becomes easier, not that the nature of the task has changed , but our ability to do has increased. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

To the birds and trees he talks:
Caesar of his leafy Rome,
There the poet is at home. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

What a man does, that he has. What has he to do with hope or fear? In himself is his might. Let him regard no good as solid but that which is in his nature, and which must grow out of him as long as he exists. The goods of fortune may come and go like summer leaves; let him scatter them on every wind as the momentary signs of his infinite productiveness. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself Which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? the debt of money or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature? For you, O broker, there is not other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred; — Ralph Waldo Emerson

As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages, and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

All things are flowing, even those that seem immovable. The adamant is always passing into smoke. The plants imbibe the materialswhich they want from the air and the ground. They burn, that is, exhale and decompose their own bodies into the air and earth again. The animal burns, or undergoes the like perpetual consumption. The earth burns, the mountains burn and decompose, slower, but incessantly. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Prayer that craves a particular commodity - anything less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every natural action is graceful. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

INTRODUCTION. OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature magically suits the man to his fortunes, by making these the fruit of his character. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

All the facts of nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, trebleor centuple use and meaning. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do you love me? Means at last do you see the same truth I see? If you do, we are happy together; but when presently one of us passes into the perception of a new truth, we are divorced and the force of all nature cannot hold us to each other. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Out from the heart of Nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing, and insults the philosopher in every moment with a million fresh particulars. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do not speak of God much. After a very little conversation on the highest nature, thought deserts us and we run into formalism. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise, - and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We must have kings, we must have nobles; nature is always providing such in every society; only let us have the real instead of the titular. In every society some are born to rule, and some to advise. The chief is the chief all the world over, only not his cap and plume. It is only this dislike of the pretender which makes men sometimes unjust to the true and finished man. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Therefore is nature ever the ally of Religion: lends her all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Man is the end of nature; nothing so easily organizes itself in every part of the universe as he; no moss, no lichen is so easilyborn; and he takes along with him and puts out from himself the whole apparatus of society and condition extempore, as an army encamps in a desert, and where all was just now blowing sand, creates a white city in an hour, a government, a market, a place for feasting, for conversation, and for love. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man of thought must feel the thought that is parent of the universe: that the masses of nature do undulate and flow. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdom which cannot help itself. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no man of Nature's worth
In the circle of the earth. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature never sends a great man into the planet, without confiding the secret to another soul. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zoology, (those first steps which the farmer, the hunter, and the sailor take,) teach that nature's dice are always loaded; that in her heaps and rubbish are concealed sure and useful results. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wisdom is not found with those who dwell at their ease; rather nature, when she adds brain, adds difficulty. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much. — 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

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. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of the permanence of nature. We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right. Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For, nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday — Ralph Waldo Emerson

In Nature, all is useful, all is beautiful — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We teach boys to be such men as we are. We do not teach them to aspire to be all they can. We do not give them a training as if webelieved in their noble nature. We scarce educate their bodies. We do not train the eye and the hand. We exercise their understandings to the apprehension and comparison of some facts, to a skill in numbers, in words; we aim to make accountants, attorneys, engineers; but not to make able, earnest, great- hearted men. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in which all things are absorbed, action tends directly back to diversity. The first is the course or gravitation of mind; the second is the power of nature. Nature is manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and creates. These two principles reappear and interpenetrate all things, all thought; the one, the many. — 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