Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes About Reality

• Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Love, Reality, Self

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010). “Self-Reliance, the Over-Soul, and Other Essays”, p.21, Coyote Canyon Press

• These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of everyone of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Reality, Self, Names

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2015). “Emerson's Essays: Top Essays”, p.42, 谷月社

• There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Pain, Grief, Reality

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Self-Reliance and Other Essays”, p.85, Courier Corporation

• At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find Nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Wise, Fall, Hero

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.541, Library of America

• Reality is a sliding door.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Reality, Doors, Sliding Doors

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010). “Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume VIII: Letters and Social Aims”, p.80, Harvard University Press

• Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds. I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my word as good as my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined, to all the eclat in the universe. This reality is the foundation of friendship, religion, poetry, and art.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Creativity, Reality

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.1122, Library of America

• He is a dull observer whose experience has not taught him the reality and force of magic, as well as of chemistry.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Reality, Magic, Dull

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1460, Delphi Classics

• Nature forever puts a premium on reality. What is done for effect is seen to be done for effect; what is done for love is felt to be done for love. A man inspires affection and honor because he was not lying in wait for these.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Truth, Honesty, Lying

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.2334, Delphi Classics

• Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Love, Reality, Self

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Self-Reliance and Other Essays”, p.21, Courier Corporation

• It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Running, Writing, Reality

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Nature and Other Essays”, p.75, Courier Corporation

• Our desires presage the capacities within us; they are harbingers of what we shall be able to accomplish. What we can do and want to do is projected in our imagination, quite outside ourselves, and into the future. We are attracted to what is already ours in secret. Thus passionate anticipation transforms what is indeed possible into dreamt-for reality.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Future, Reality, Imagination

• We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Kings, Reality, Greek

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “The Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.16, Graphic Arts Books

• The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the Para coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is reality that will not dodge us.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Summer, Rain, Reality

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.203, Penguin

• It is the same among the men and women, as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is it, that beauty can never be grasped? In persons and in landscape is equally inaccessible?

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Reality, Men, Tree

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Nature and Other Essays”, p.45, Courier Corporation

• The reality is more excellent than the report.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Reality, Excellent, Reports

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2008). “Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.204, ReadHowYouWant.com

• Genius is the naturalist or geographer of the supersensible regions, and draws their map; and, by acquainting us with new fields of activity, cools our affection for the old. These are at once accepted as the reality, of which the world we have conversed with is the show.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Reality, Genius, World

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Ernest Spiller, Alfred Riggs Ferguson, Wallace E. Williams, Joseph Slater (1987). “The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative men: seven lectures”, p.10, Harvard University Press

• I am not engaged to Christianity by decent forms, or saving ordinances; it is not usage, it is not what I do not understand, that binds me to it -- let these be the sandy foundations of falsehoods. What I revere and obey in it is its reality, its boundless charity, its deep interior life, the rest it gives to my mind, the echo it returns to my thoughts, the perfect accord it makes with my reason through all its representation of God and His Providence; and the persuasion and courage that come out thence to lead me upward and onward.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Reality, Echoes, Giving

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.2907, Delphi Classics

• A third felicity of age is that it has found expression. The youth suffers not only from ungratified desires, but from powers untried, and from a picture in his mind of a career which has as yet no outward reality. He is tormented with the want of correspondence between things and thoughts.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Reality, Careers, Expression

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1971). “The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude”, p.165, Harvard University Press

• The best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions; and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Religious, Simple, Reality

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1971). “The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude”, p.122, Harvard University Press

• Power obeys reality, and not appearances; power is according to quality, and not quantity.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Power, Reality, Quality

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010). “The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843-1871”, p.315, University of Georgia Press

• A man should not go where he cannot carry his whole sphere or society with him,Mnot bodily, the whole circle of his friends, but atmospherically. He should preserve in a new company the same attitude of mind and reality of relation, which his daily associates draw him to, else he is shorn of his best beams, and will be an orphan in the merriest club.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Attitude, Reality, Men

• The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life,in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Faith, Art, Truth

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1872). “Representative men. English traits. Conduct of life”, p.155

• Our faith comes in moments . . . yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Faith, Reality, Depth

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.385, Library of America

• Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness,--these are the threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Time, Reality, Surprise

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.216, Penguin

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