Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

“Some roses grow through concrete. Remember that.”
― Brandi L. Bates, Red Flags

“As it often did when I thought about chicken wings and entropy, my mind turned to Emerson. "Life is a journey, not a destination." Now that was one stone-cold motherfucker who was not afraid to deliver the truth: After the torments of the journey, you have been well-prepared for the agonies of the destination.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death

“Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television.”
― Paul Hawken

“Self-reliance is the highest expression of self-respect.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that there are always men who like to feel a natural superiority which is not dependent on accomplish­ment and does not need to be proved.”
― Michael Hogan, The Irish Soldiers of Mexico

“Enmerson's interest is in the workshop phase, the birthing stage of art, not the museum moment, the embalming phase. Poetry mimics Creation and is therefore sacred. More precisely, just as God may indeed be a verb (as Mary Daly insists), poetry is the act of creating. The process of poetry also mimics the process of nature. 'This expression or naming is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature is a certain self-regulated motion or change.' Another aspect of nature is genius, which, as Emerson observes, 'is the activity which repairs the decays of things.”
― Robert D. Richardson, First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process

“{McCabe on the influential scientist Luther Burbank}

His magnificent work, which added an incalculable sum to the wealth of America and left him a comparatively poor man, is well known. His own simple account of his discoveries runs to 12 volumes and is incomplete. I was one of the few men whom he admitted to his house in Santa Rosa in the few months before he died and I found him advanced even beyond the vague Emersonian theism of his earlier years. He agreed to see me, he said, though he was tired and ill, because of his admiration of my work as a rationalist. He had just raised a storm by a public declaration that he did not believe in a future life, and his biographer Wilbur Hale repeats this.”
― Joseph McCabe, A Biographical Dictionary of Ancient Medieval and Modern Freethinkers

“You are yourself a Sequoia. Stop and get acquainted with your brethren... It will do you good.”
― John Muir