Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes on Knowledge
Emerson's Nature (1836), the American Scholar address (1837), and the essays of the 1840s gave American Transcendentalism its central philosophical statements. The principal thesis is the doctrine of self-reliance: the individual soul has direct access to the universal spirit (the Over-Soul) of which the natural world is the symbolic expression, and the proper philosophical attitude is therefore the original relation to the universe that each generation must establish for itself rather than inheriting from the books and traditions of the past. The framework integrates Romantic, Neoplatonist, and Hindu philosophical resources with the New England Unitarian theological background Emerson left behind, and shaped the entire subsequent American intellectual tradition through Thoreau, Whitman, William James, John Dewey, and beyond.
Quotes
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“What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.”
Fortune of the Republic (1878) -
Attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
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“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
November 11, 1842 -
“He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.”
The Method of Nature (1841), p. 25 -
“I fancy I need more than another to speak (rather than write), with such a formidable tendency to the lapidary style. I build my house of boulders.”
Letter to Thomas Carlyle (30 October 1841) -
“Walter Savage Landor ", from The Dial , xii (1841)”
Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty. -
“Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.”
Walter Savage Landor", from The Dial , xii (1841) -
“Walter Savage Landor", from The Dial , xii (1841)”
Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition. -
“Though thou loved her as thyself, As a self of purer clay, Tho' her parting dims the day, Stealing grace from all alive, Heartily know, When half-gods go, The gods arrive.”
Poems(1847) | Give All to Love , st. 4 -
“Go where he will, the wise man is at home, His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome.”
Poems(1847) | Wood-notes , st. 3 -
“It costs a beautiful person no exertion to paint her image on our eyes; yet how splendid is that benefit! It costs no more for a wise soul to convey his quality to other men.”
Representative Men(1850) | Uses of Great Men -
“If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again.”
May-Day and Other Pieces(1867) | Brahma , st. 1 Composed in July 1856 this poem is derived from a major passage of the Bhagavad Gita , one of the most popular of Hindu scriptures, and portions of it were likely a paraphrase of an exi -
“Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master at some point, and in that, I learn of him.”
Letters and Social Aims(1876) | Greatness -
“Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, and no force of character can make any stand against good wit.”
Letters and Social Aims(1876) | The Comic -
“How we hate this solemn Ego that accompanies the learned, like a double, wherever he goes.”
Journals (1822–1863) | 1839 -
“Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.”
Journals (1822–1863) | May 1849 -
“The book written against fame and learning has the author's name on the title-page.”
Journals (1822–1863) | 1857