Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.

In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.

Children are all foreigners.

A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.

Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.

There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him asleep.

We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.

I like my boy with his endless sweet soliloquies and iterations and his utter inability to conceive why I should not leave all my nonsense, business, and writing and come to tie up his toy horse, as if there was or could be any end to nature beyond his horse. And he is wiser than […]

It is so easy to give a naughty boy a slap, overpower him in an instant, and make him obey, that in this world of hurry and distraction, who can possibly spend time to wait for the slow return of his reason and the conquest of himself in the uncertainty too whether that will ever […]

It is as impossible for a man to be cheated by any one but himself, as for a thing to be and not to be at the same time.