Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes on Love
Ralph Waldo Emerson was a 19th-century American essayist, lecturer, and poet, the leading figure of the Transcendentalist movement in New England. This page collects quotes attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson on the topic of love, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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Attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“The only way to have a friend is to be one.”
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“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 -
“Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.”
Walter Savage Landor ", from The Dial , xii (1841) -
“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 -
“Though love repine, and reason chafe, There came a voice without reply, — "'T is man's perdition to be safe When for the truth he ought to die."”
May-Day and Other Pieces(1867) | Sacrifice -
“The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.”
Journals (1822–1863) | February 12, 1851; cf. the remark of John Wilkes about Samuel Johnson , " Liberty is as ridiculous in his mouth as Religion in mine" (20 March 1778), quoted in Boswell 's Life of Johnson (1791) -
“A ruddy drop of manly blood The surging sea outweighs, The world uncertain comes and goes; The lover rooted stays.”
May-Day and Other Pieces(1867) | Friendship -
“Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see — not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.”
Journals (1822–1863) | April 11, 1834