Ralph Waldo Emerson Individual Quotations

And truly it demands something godlike in him who cast off the common motives of humanity and ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster.

A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist.

We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.

Our expenses are all for conformity.

Washington, where an insignificant individual may trespass on a nation's time.

In the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party to his present estate.

Nature is reckless of the individual. When she has points to carry, she carries them.

Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.

If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience.

In daily life what distinguishes the master is the using those materials he has, instead of looking about for what are more renowned, or what others have used well.

Now every one must do after his kind, be he asp or angel, and these must.

All public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized.

An individual is an encloser. Time and space, liberty and necessity, truth and thought, are left at large no longer.

Proverbs, words, and grammar inflections convey the public sense with more purity and precision, than the wisest individual.

Every individual nature has its own beauty. One is struck in every company, at every fireside, with the riches of nature, when he hears so many new tones, all musical, sees in each person original manners, which have a proper and peculiar charm, and reads new expressions of face. He perceives that nature has laid for each the foundations of a divine building, if the soul will build thereon.

The universal does not attract us until housed in an individual.

The riddle of the age has for each a private solution.

No society can ever be so large as one man.

Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.

No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing.

Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.