Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

God warns before he wounds.

All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks, in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.

Perfect sincerity, holiness, gigantic intellect, and all-conquering will. Let only a handful of men work with these, and the whole world will be revolutionized.

The greatest events of an age are its best thoughts. Thought finds its way into action.

God sees in you a masterpiece about to happen

A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him," my father had told me more than once. "A businessman has business books and a dream has novels and books of poetry. Most women like reading about love, and a true revolutionary will have books about the minutiae of overthrowing the oppressor. A person with no books is inconsequential in a modern setting, but a peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.

I am The Catalyst of Change

Here's good news: God is even more committed to your change, your growth, and your transformation than you are.

If I had rubies, riches, and crowns, I'd buy the whole world and change things around.

Everyday God gives us a moment in which it is possible to change everything that makes us unhappy.

I titled my book "Revolution." And that is exactly what it is. France is experiencing a time of transformation - in education, on the labor market and in the pensions system. We're talking about a cultural revolution.

There's an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind none the less and a cleaner, better stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.

We are the beginning ... We always have been. This time, let it be more than a beginning.

Many of us knock on the door but remain outside, because knocking and entering are entirely different actions. Knocking is necessary, consisting of reading books, attending meetings, asking questions. But entrance requires much bolder action. It requires one to enter into himself, to uncover hidden motives, to see contradictions, and to realize his actual power for self-change.

Oh God! that one might read the book of fate, And see the revolution of the times Make mountains level, and the continent, Weary of solid firmness, melt itself Into the sea.

Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.

A great philosopher in the wrong is like a beacon on the reefs which says to seamen: steer clear of me.

After me, the Revolution - or, rather the ideas which formed it - will resume their course. It will be like a book from which the marker is removed, and one starts to read again at the page where one left off.

God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.

Ideas are very important to the shaping of society. In fact, they are more powerful than bombings or armies or guns. And this is because ideas are capable of spreading without limit. They are behind all the choices we make. They can transform the world in a way that governments and armies cannot. Fighting for liberty with ideas makes more sense to me than fighting with guns or politics or political power. With ideas, we can make real change that lasts.

I'm so grateful that God allowed me to go through that because it's made me.

In the century that has just passed, many of the intellectual elite went mad. It was as if, with the death of God, everyone suddenly turned into a saviour who wanted either to annihilate the obsolete world order or to establish a utopia. Naturally, there were writers among those who went mad. The fact that they had knowledge did not exempt intellectuals: there is madness everywhere. When one loses control over one's self, the result is madness.

We know the redemption must come. The time and the manner of its coming we know not: It may come in peace, or it may come in blood; but whether in peace or in blood, LET IT COME.

A share in two revolutions is living to some purpose.

We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them.