Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

To be great is to be misunderstood.

People misunderstand me.

If you want to love, take the time to listen to your heart. In most ancient and wise cultures it is a regular practice for people to talk to their heart. There are rituals, stories, and meditative skills in every spiritual tradition that awaken the voice of the heart. To live wisely, this practice is essential, because our heart is the source of our connection to and intimacy with all of life. And life is love. This mysterious quality of love is all around us, as real as gravity... Yet how often we forget about love.

Life is a place where it is necessary to move gently. Whether it be in thought, speech, or action, the rhythm must be controlled; the law of harmony must be observed in all that one does. If there is anything that will bring satisfaction it is diving deep into Love, and then we shall realize that there is nothing which is not just; we shall never again say that anything is unjust. This is the point the wise reach, and they call it the culmination of wisdom.

genius is original, unique; and in whatever form it may develop itself is the greatest gift that can be given to man, the strongest known link between the material life we have and the spiritual life that we can only guess at. Every great poet, painter, or musician - every inventor or man of science, every fine actor or orator, comes to us as the exponent of something diviner than we know. We cannot understand it, but we feel it, and acknowledge it.

We cannot advance without new experiments in living, but no wise man tries every day what he has proved wrong the day before.

To be wise use three languages: think well, feel well and do well. And to be wise allow yourselves to be surprised by the love of God. That will guarantee a good life.

Most of the things I do are misunderstood. Hey, after all, being misunderstood is the fate of all true geniuses, is it not?

The wisest men are wise to the full in death.

Suddenly, all at once, she knows, knows that he doesn't understand her, that he never will, that he lacks the power to understand such perverseness. And that he can never move fast enough to catch her.

The geniuses have created, but they were less: the saints have been, but they created little...A twofold tragedy of creativeness reveals the truth that there has not yet been in our world a religious epoch of creativity.

The world progresses only through misunderstanding.

The wise are not learned, the learned are not wise.

Life with Fools consists in Drinking; with the wise Man, living's Thinking.

A certain excessiveness seems a necessary element in all greatness.

You shall find books and sermons everywhere, in the land and in the sea, in the earth and in the skies, and you shall learn from every living beast, and bird, and fish, and insect, and from every useful or useless plant that springs from the ground.

The book that I shall make people read is the book of the heart, which holds the key to the mystery of life

... The wise in all ages... have tried to learn one thing only, and that was resignation to the Will of God. By doing this, they have reached a stage at which they could see from God's point of view.

This is one of the results of that adventurous spirit which is now stalking forth and raging for its own innovations. We have not only rejected AUTHORITY, but have also cast away EXPERIENCE; and often the unburthened vessel is driving to all points of the compass, and the passengers no longer know whither they are going. The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by QUOTATION.

Wise men say nothing in dangerous times

Anything a man does can bring him closer to the Supreme Wisdom, as long as he works with Love in his heart.

Genius is mainly an affair of energy.

The gate is small because truth guards the entrance. The way is narrow because the Lord protects us with wise boundaries.

He who anticipates his century is generally persecuted when living, and always pilfered when dead.

Great truths are portions of the soul of man; Great souls are portions of eternity.