Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

All things are symbols: the external shows Of Nature have their image in the mind , As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves.

Visibility is a tricky thing; is someone visible when you can point her out in a crowd, or when you understand what her life feels like to her?

You can't create a movie as you think about it. And what's in the scene is not what's being seen. A shot always means something other than what it is. All are vehicles. A landscape is just a vehicle. The viewer might think different things, and I'm not going to intervene.

The self is merely the lens through which we see others and the world.

The government says Rant's alive because they need a villain. The kids say he's alive because they need a hero.

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.

What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others

There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.

To a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself.

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.

Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?

It ain't what things actually are, it's all they stand for.

Whether you call someone a hero or a monster is all relative to where the focus of your consciousness may be.

The world is as you are.

The map appears to us more real than the land.

Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual.

Some people that are heroes to some can be looked at by another group of people as villains. As far as a middle point, just speaking for myself, that's exactly what to avoid.

I am 46, and have been for some time past.

A cloud can look like a camel, but a camel is unlikely to look like a cloud. This is so because the signifier must be able to stand for the whole category of the signified. The cloud looks like all camels, but no camel looks like all clouds.

Things are symbols of themselves.

So you want another story?" Uhh... no. We would like to know what really happened." Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?" Uhh... perhaps in English. In Japanese a story would have an element of invention in it. We don't want any invention. We want the 'straight facts,' as you say in English." Isn't telling about something--using words, English or Japanese--already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be. And our attitudes and behaviors grow out of these assumptions.