Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

There is something wonderful about a book. We can pick it up. We can heft it. We can read it. We can set it down. We can think of what we have read. It does something for us. We can share great minds, great actions, and great undertakings in the pages of a book.

The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species.

Not only the individual experience slowly acquired, but the accumulated experience of the race, organized in language, condensed in instruments and axioms, and in what may be called the inherited intuitions--these form the multiple unity which is expressed in the abstract term "experience.

It's a society of knowledge and experience. You have better experience and knowledge when you are 60, 65 and 70.

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

Time, still as he flies, adds increase to her truth, and gives to her mind what he steals from her youth.

At 100, I have a mind that is superior - thanks to experience - than when I was 20.

Mind is the great lever of all things; human thought is the process by which human ends are ultimately answered.

The wisdom acquired with the passage of time is a useless gift unless you share it.

A civilization is a social entity that manifests religious, political legal, and customary uniformity over an extended period, and which confers on its members the benefits of socially accumulated knowledge.

We learn from each other. We learn from others' mistakes, from their experience, their wisdom. It makes it easier for us to come to better decisions in our own lives.

A hallmark of a healthy creative culture is that its people feel free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms. Our decision-making is better when we draw on the collective knowledge and unvarnished opinions of the group.

Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still, it is never complete.

You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. Stick to Facts, sir!

Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

There is an unbroken continuum from the wisdom of the body to the wisdom of the mind, from the wisdom of the individual to the wisdom of the race.

A library is a gateway to others' minds, hearts, and lives.

The longer you live, the more likely you are to have something to say.

The older you get, the more you know about certain things.

There’s always someone who knows something.

Books are embalmed minds.

To ask at what time a man has first any ideas is to ask when he begins to perceive; having ideas and perception being the same thing.

While it is wise to learn from experience, it is wiser to learn from the experiences of others.

Ideas come from everything

The mind always functions in an eccentric way, the mind is always an idiot. The really intelligent person has no mind. Intelligence arises out of no-mind, idiocy out of the mind. Mind is idiotic, no-mind is wise. No-mind is wisdom, intelligence. Mind depends on knowledge, on methods, on money, on experience, on this and that. Mind always needs props, it needs supports, it cannot exist on its own. On its own, it flops.