Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

the most deeply moving element in the contemplation of beauty is the element of loss. We desire to hold; but the sunset melts into the night, and the secret of the painting on the wall can never be the secret of the buyer.

Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.

The ideal beauty is a fugitive which is never found.

The real problem with happiness is neither its pursuers nor their books; it's happiness itself. Happiness is like beauty: part of its glory lies in its transience.

O human beauty, what a dream art thou, that we should cast our life and hopes away on thee!

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

The stars are golden fruit upon a tree all out of reach.

For our part, when we feel, we evaporate; ah, we breathe ourselves out and away; with each new heartfire we give off a fainter scent. True, someone may tell us: you're in my blood, this room, Spring itself is filled with you . . . To what end? He can't hold us, we vanish within him and around him.

I read somewhere that happiness is like the bluebird of Maeterlinck: Try to catch it and it loses its color. It's like trying to hold water in your hands. The more you squeeze it, the more the water runs away.

The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence. The destruction of Troy. The fall of the petals from fruit trees in blossom. To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence - that is beautiful.

As beauteous is the world, and many a joy Floats through its wide dominion. But, alas, When we would seize the winged good, it flies.

I like being the girl nobody can have.

He has no idea how beautiful the ordinary becomes once it disappears.

Where dwells the religion? Tell me first where dwells electricity, or motion, or thought or gesture. They do not dwell or stay atall. Electricity cannot be made fast, mortared up and ended, like London Monument, or the Tower, so that you shall know where to find it, and keep it fixed, as the English do with their things, forevermore; it is passing, glancing, gesticular; it is a traveller, a newness, a surprise, a secret which perplexes them, and puts them out.

Being in love was like China: you knew it was there, and no doubt it was very interesting, and some people went there, but I never would.

Truth ... Is a breath, a wind, A shadow, a phantom; Long have I pursued it, But never have I touched The hem of its garment.

XXVIII "Truth," said a traveller, "Is a rock, a mighty fortress; "Often have I been to it, "Even to its highest tower, "From whence the world looks black." "Truth," said a traveller, "Is a breath, a wind, "A shadow, a phantom; "Long have I pursued it, "But never have I touched "The hem of its garment." And I believed the second traveller; For truth was to me A breath, a wind, A shadow, a phantom, And never had I touched The hem of its garment.

When you catch what you're after, it's gone.

Tell me now in what hidden way isLady Flora the lovely Roman?Where's Hipparchia, and where is Thais,Neither of them the fairer woman?Where is Echo, beheld of no man,Only heard on river and mere-She whose beauty was more than human?-But where are the snows of yester-year?

It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.

remember the golden apple-trees; O, do not pity them, as you watch them drop one by one, for they fall exhausted, numb, blind but in certain ecstasy, for theirs is the hunger for Paradise.

There is a wonderful expression: seeing through a glass darkly. Everything, even life, is inevitably removed from you. You can't reach, or touch, the real. You just see reflections

Personal beauty is then first charming and itself, when it dissatisfies us with any end; when it becomes a story without an end; when it suggests gleams and visions, and not earthly satisfactions; when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he cannot feel his right to it, though he were Caesar; he cannot feel more right to it than to the firmament and the splendors of a sunset.

Flowers, cold from the dew, And autumn's approaching breath, I pluck for the warm, luxuriant braids, Which haven't faded yet. In their nights, fragrantly resinous, Entwined with delightful mystery, They will breathe in her springlike Extraordinary beauty. But in a whirlwind of sound and fire, From her shing head they will flutter And fall—and before her They will die, faintly fragrant still. And, impelled by faithful longing, My obedient gaze will feast upon them— With a reverent hand, Love will gather their rotting remains.

Where is perfection? Where I cannot reach.