Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is 'look under foot.' You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think.

If religion and life depend upon books or upon the existence of any prophet whatsoever, then perish all religion and books! Religion is in us. No books or teachers can do more than help us to find it, and even without them we can get all truth within. You have gratitude for books and teachers without bondage to them; and worship your Guru as God, but do not obey him blindly; love him all you will, but think for yourself. No blind belief can save you, work out your own salvation. Have only one idea of God - that He is an eternal help.

A book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us.

To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness; the self is a book of many volumes which you cannot read in a day, but when once you begin to read, you must read every word, every sentence, every paragraph for in them are the intimations of the whole. The beginning of it is the ending of it. If you know how to read, supreme wisdom is to be found.

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun.... there are millions of suns left, You shall no longer take things at second or third hand.... nor look through the eyes of the dead.... nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

By the time I was sixteen I had read many books and I had become a freethinker.

Remember this always: The living of your own life writes the book of your most sacred truth, and offers evidence of it.

Books simply help you to see what is already within your self. That's what enlightenment is all about.

Know thyself, for through thyself only thou canst know God.

If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

I believe in choosing the hardest book imaginable. I believe in reading up on what others have to say about this difficult book, and then making up my own mind.

Only within yourself exists the other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul.

Right now, in this moment, your soul has again created opportunity for you to be, do, and have what it takes to know Who You Really Are. Your soul has brought you to the words you are reading right now-as it has brought you to words of wisdom and truth before. What will you do now? What will you choose to be? Your soul waits, and watches with interest, as it has many times before.

Each time we see and are touched by the expression of some eternal principle, we catch a sweet glimpse of some aspect of our True Self.

I seek to speak to you, in some way, as your own self. Who can tell what this may meanI myself do not know, but if you listen, things will be said that are perhaps not written in this book. And this will be due not to me but to the One who lives and speaks in both.

I don't believe in holy writ. Buy fifty books or twenty-five books, take three weeks off, read them and make up your own theory. The fact that you end up literally burning twenty-two out of twenty-five books is beside the point.

No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books.

He whose book of the heart has been opened needs no other books.

I am afraid I am one of those people who continues to read in the hope of sometime discovering in a book a single—and singular—piece of wisdom so penetrating, so soul stirring, so utterly applicable to my own life as to make all the bad books I have read seem well worth the countless hours spent on them. My guess is that this wisdom, if it ever arrives, will do so in the form of a generalization.

To know yourself you need not go to any book, to any priest, to any psychologist. The whole treasure is within yourself.

You may go on reading any number of books on Meditation. They can only tell you ‘Realize the Self’. The Self cannot be found in books. You have to find it for yourself in yourself.

To seek Divinity merely in books is to seek the living among the dead... seek God within your own soul.

Why do you read many books? The great book is within your heart. Open the pages of this inexhaustible book, the source of all knowledge. You will know everything.

Keep reading books, but remember that a book’s only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself.