Ralph Waldo Emerson Heaven Quotations

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

I find it more credible, since it is anterior information, that one man should know heaven, as the Chinese say, than that so many men should know the world.

No matter what your work, let it be your own. No matter what your occupation, let what you are doing be organic. Let it be in your bones. In this way, you will open the door by which the affluence of heaven and earth shall stream into you.

For, rightly, every man is a channel through which heaven floweth, and, whilst I fancied I was criticising him, I was censuring orrather terminating my own soul.

The energetic action of the times develops individualism, and the religious appear isolated. I esteem this a step in the right direction. Heaven deals with us on no representative system. Souls are not saved in bundles.

We pray to be conventional. But the wary Heaven takes care you shall not be, if there is anything good in you. Dante was very badcompany, and was never invited to dinner.

The visible heavens and earth sympathize with Jesus.

Underneath the inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection, the Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam.

We know that madness belongs to love,--what power to paint a vile object in hues of heaven.

Heaven often protects valuable souls charged with great secrets, great ideas, by long shutting them up with their own thoughts.

We are never without a pilot. When we know not how to steer, and dare not hoist a sail, we can drift. The current knows the way, though we do not. The ship of heaven guides itself, and will not accept a wooden rudder.

Heaven is large, and affords space for all modes of love and fortitude.

The ship of heaven guides itself and will not accept a wooden rudder.

Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world; and beyond its world a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you: build, therefore, your own world.

Heaven always bears some proportion to earth. The god of the cannibal will be a cannibal, of the crusades a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.

Yet things are knowable! They are knowable, because, being from one, things correspond. There is a scale: and the correspondence of heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our guide. As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; and science of quantities, called mathematics; a science of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,--I call it Dialectic,--which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true.

In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul?

Every man is a channel through which heaven floweth.

Heaven sometimes hedges a rare character about with ungainliness and odium, as the burr that protects the fruit.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven depending on whether they compare it to something better and so feel disappointed and bitter or something worse and so feel relieved and grateful.

God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth.

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

Many might go to Heaven with half the labor they go to hell.

The angels are so enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether their be any who understand it or not.

The betrothed and accepted lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden by her acceptance. She was heaven while he pursued her, but she cannot be heaven if she stoops to one such as he!

Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.

Dear to us are those who love us... but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.