Ralph Waldo Emerson - quotes
The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.
About author
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON, the most original of American philosophers and essayists, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, May 25, 1803, and he died at Concord, in his native State, April 27, 1882. His father was a Unitarian minister, and the boy was trained for the same profession. Emerson entered Harvard University at the age of fourteen and graduated at eighteen. He was ordained minister of a Boston Unitarian congregation in 1829, but changes in his religious views led to his resignation of his charge in 1832. In 1833 he visited England, where he spent a year, then returned and lived a quiet, retired life at Concord, Massachusetts. His pen first... |
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A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.
A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
A good indignation brings out all one's powers.
A great man is always willing to be little.
A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.
A man in debt is so far a slave.
A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles.
A man is what he thinks about all day long.
A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.
Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
All diseases run into one, old age.
All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.
All life is an experiment.
All mankind love a lover.
All sensible people are selfish, and nature is tugging at every contract to make the terms of it fair.
Always do what you are afraid to do.
America is another name for opportunity.
An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.
As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.
As soon as there is life there is danger.
As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.
Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.
Be an opener of doors.
Beauty is an outward gift, which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.
Beauty without expression is boring.
Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.
Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.
Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?
Cards were at first for benefits designed, sent to amuse, not to enslave the mind.
Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.
Children are all foreigners.
Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.
Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.
Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.
Culture is one thing and varnish is another.
Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.
Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.
Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.
Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.
Earth laughs in flowers.
Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.
Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.
Every artist was first an amateur.
Every burned book enlightens the world.
Every hero becomes a bore at last.
Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.
Every man has his own vocation, talent is the call.
Every man I meet is in some way my superior.
Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.
Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.
Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.
Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.
Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.
Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all revolutions.
Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.
Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.
Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.
For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.
Genius always finds itself a century too early.
Getting old is a fascination thing. The older you get, the older you want to get.
God enters by a private door into every individual.
God screens us evermore from premature ideas.
Good men must not obey the laws too well.
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.
He builded better than he knew; the conscious stone to beauty grew.
He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.
Hitch your wagon to a star.
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.
I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.
If a man can... make a better mousetrap, the world will make a beaten path to his door.
If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.
In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.
In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.
In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.
Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.
It is not length of life, but depth of life.
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 'always do what you are afraid to do.'
Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.
Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.
Let every man shovel out his own snow and the whole city will be passable.
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.
Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.
Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.
Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.
Make yourself necessary to somebody.
Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.
Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.
Men are what their mothers made them.
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.
Money often costs too much.
Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
Nature hates calculators.
Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
New York is a sucked orange.
Night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree.
No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.
No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.
No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.
Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.
Our best thoughts come from others.
Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.
Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.
Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
People only see what they are prepared to see.
People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else.
People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.
Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.
Pictures must not be too picturesque.
Reality is a sliding door.
Revolutions go not backward.
Science does not know its debt to imagination.
Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.
Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.
The ancestor of every action is a thought.
The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.
The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
The first wealth is health.
The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.
The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
The louder he talked of his honor the faster we counted our spoons.
The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.
The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?
The miracles of genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be analyzed.
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.
The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.
The reward of a thing well done is having done it.
The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.
The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.
The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.
The whole secret of the teacher's force lies in the conviction that man are convertible.
The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.
The years teach much which the days never knew.
Then beauty is its own excuse for being.
There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.
There is a tendency for things to right themselves.
There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.
This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
To be great is to be misunderstood.
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.
Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.
Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.
Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.
Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.
Washington, where an insignificant individual may trespass on a nation's time.
We acquire the strength we have overcome.
We aim above the mark to hit the mark.
We are always getting ready to live but never living.
We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.
We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
We are wiser than we know.
We do what we must, and call it by the best names.
We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
We must be our own before we can be another's.
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.
What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour.
What you do speak so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.
When we quarrel, how we wish we had been blameless.
Who you are speaks so loudly I can't hear what you're saying.
Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.
Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.
With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.
