Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

To hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all this is nothing but to perceive.

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.

Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind

I am thing that thinks: that is, a things that doubts,affirms, denies, understands a few things, is ignorant of many things, is willing, is unwilling, and also which imagines and has sensory perceptions.

Words are power. And a book is full of words. Be careful what power you get from it. But know that you do.

A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it.

The soul never thinks without a picture.

Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though in truth his dreaming must be not out of proportion to his waking.

Imagination is the wide-open eye which leads us always to see truth more vividly.

I'm always coming up with ideas that have been inspired by memories, everyday life and this and that and the other.

Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.

That man sees indeed the truth who sees that vision and creation are one.

I like to go into a space, listen, absorb, and then interpret.

It's sort of a mystery where ideas come from.

Philiosophers like Hume and Descartes and Hobbes saw things similarly. They thought that mental images and ideas were actually the same thing. There are those today that dispute that, and lots of debates about how the mind works, but for me it's simple: Mental images, for most of us, are central in inventive and creative thinking.

A really intelligent man makes an indifferent painter. For painting requires a certain blindness, a partial refusal to be aware of all the options.

What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.

To ask at what time a man has first any ideas is to ask when he begins to perceive; having ideas and perception being the same thing.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education.