Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

I believe in holiness and sacredness in other people. It doesn't mean that the clouds part and I see God. That's a juvenile way of thinking about it.

Divinity is an emotion of being lifted out of yourself and being part of something much bigger than yourself that makes you go, 'Oh my God.' And that sense of awe? It's the second rule of science.

As told in Friendship with God, if we simply decided to believe and act as if first, we're all one, and second, life is eternal, it would render virtually everything we've done all our lives pointless.

A rare experience of a moment at daybreak, when something in nature seems to reveal all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon. Yet it is part of the day's unity.

Honestly, I'm not a big person in terms of religion, but I really believe in nature. I feel like anytime you see anything beautiful in nature that's the closest I'm ever going to get to God or a sense of a higher power.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

The Beduin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God.

The groves were God's first temples.

I was interested in transcendence from a very early age. I was interested in what was over there, what was behind life. So when I had my first communion I was very disappointed. I had expected something amazing and surprising and spiritual. Instead all I got was a bicycle. That wasn't what I was after at all.

We do not want merely to see beauty... we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses, and nymphs and elves.

Our ego seeks to understand everything. It wants all the answers. Part of what destroys the ego and connects us with the light is doing things that absolutely don't make any sense. If we want something beyond logic, like a miracle, we have to do something that is beyond logic.

One thing I really, truly believe in is having something greater than myself to be grateful to.

I am become a transparent eyeball.

The emotion felt by a man in the presence of nature certainly counts for something in the origin of religions.

By the sense of mystery I understand the experience of certain places and times when one's whole nature seems to be in touch with a presence, a genius loci, a potency.

Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.

Take God from nature, nothing great is left.

Years ago I went to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and did what all tourists there do: wrote some words on a scrap of paper that I tucked into a crevice in the wall. When I closed my eyes and touched my head to the warm stone, it came to me: "All language is prayer." This must be so. Who is it we are speaking to when we speak to anyone? To that person, and also past him or her to Out There. If there is language, it means there is the possibility of being heard, being met, being loved. And reaching out to be heard, met, or loved is a holy act. Language is holy.

The transcendent experience is brotherly love, nature, harmony and unity. Cultures, in trying to define it, try to define an external deity as opposed to the process.

Believing is nothing other than, in the darkness of the world, touching the hand of God, and in this way, in silence, hearing the Word, seeing love.

I don't really want people looking to me for inspiration. I just want to be a sign along the way that points toward Heaven.

If we don’t think about God, everything ends up being about 'me' and my own comfort.

No purpose intervenes between I and You, no greed and no anticipation; and longing itself is changed as it plunges from the dream into appearance. Every means is an obstacle. Only where all means have disintegrated encounters occur.