Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it.

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality.

Then there is the further question of what is the relationship of thinking to reality. As careful attention shows, thought itself is in an actual process of movement.

I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake--whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain.

The connection between our knowledge and the abyss of being is still real, and the explication must be not less magnificent.

What, then is truth?... Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.

The conception of objective reality ... has thus evaporated ... into the transparent clarity of mathematics that represents no longer the behavior of particles but rather our knowledge of this behavior.

I might as well doubt of my own being, as of the being of those things I actually see and feel.

Without knowing the Knower, all the knowledge that one gathers cannot be valid.

Facts do not convey truth. That's a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.

That which is not present in deep dreamless sleep is not real

I searched everywhere for a proof of reality, when all the while I understood quite well that the standard of reality had changed

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.

Perhaps that is our doom, our human curse, to never really know one another. We erect edifices in our minds about the flimsy framework of word and deed, mere totems of the true person, who, like the gods to whom the temples were built, remains hidden. We understand our own construct; we know our own theory; we love our own fabrication. Still . . . does the artifice of our affection make our love any less real?

Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal

I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that’s a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.

The crude real will not by itself yield truth.

The late philosopher Morris R. Cohen of CCNY was asked by a student in the metaphysics course, Professor Cohen, how do I know that I exist? The keen old prof replied, And who is asking?

Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.

Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.

We human beings instinctively regard the seen world as the "real" world and the unseen world as the "unreal" world, but the Bible calls for almost the opposite.

We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.

Because I believe that I know about that aspect of hip-hop better than any one else, I'm trying my best in order to be the most real I can in this situation.