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| Ralph Waldo Emerson born May 1803 died April 1882 was a renowned and prolific author, poet, and critic. |
Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fate is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought for causes which are un-penetrated.
Many a profound genius, I suppose, who fills the world with fame of his exploding renowned errors, is yet everyday posed and baffled by trivial questions at his own supper table.
If we must accept fate we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character.
All persons are puzzles until at last we find in some word or act the key to the man, to the woman; straightway all their past words and actions lie in light before us.
We do not live an equal life, but one of contrasts and patchwork; now a little joy, then a sorrow, now a sin, then a generous or brave action.
If a man carefully examines his thoughts he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future. His well-being is always ahead. Such a creature is probably immortal.
Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.
Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon balls, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today.
If men would avoid that general language and general manner in which they strive to hide all that is peculiar, and would say only what was uppermost in their own minds, after their own individual manner, every man would be interesting.
Each moment of the year has its own beauty; a picture which was never seen before and which shall never be seen again.
To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.
Let us replace sentimentalism by realism and dare to uncover those simple and terrible laws which, be they seen or unseen, pervade and govern.
No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby; so helpless and so ridiculous.
If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.
Heaven always bears some proportion to earth. The God of the cannibal will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.
Man is physical as well as metaphysical, a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.
A man known to us only as a celebrity in politics or in trade, gains largely in our esteem if we discover that he has some intellectual taste or skill.
A poem, a sentence, causes us to see ourselves. I be, and I see my being, at the same time.
Every individual strives to grow and exclude, to the extremities of the universe, and to impose the law of its being on every other creature.
A scholar is a man with his inconvenience, that, when you ask him his opinion of any matter, he must go home and look up his manuscripts to know.
The astonishment of life is the absence of any appearances of reconciliation between the theory and the practice of life.
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.
The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.
Money, which represents the prose of life, and is hardly spoken of in parlors without apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no luster as you turn it in your hand, until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors.
There is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society.
If you have a nation of men who have risen to that height of moral cultivation that they will not declare war or carry arms, for they have not so much madness left in their brains, you have a nation of lovers, of benefactors, of true, great, and able men.
So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the path of each man’s genius contracts itself to a very few hours.
Begin and proceed on a settled conviction that but little is permitted to any man to do or to know, and if he complies with the first grand laws, he shall do well.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
Conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children, and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.
The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.
Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it.
A man builds a fine house, and now he has a master, and a task for life; he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair the rest of his days.
We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.
Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence and whereto.
Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day.
A feeble man can see the farms that are fenced and tilled, the houses that are built. The strong man sees the possible houses and farms. His eye makes estates as fast as the sun breeds clouds.
Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is a million fathoms deep.
That which we persist in doing becomes easier, not that the task itself has become easier, but that our ability to perform it has improved.
A part of fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in his soul.
Our first mistake is the belief that the circumstance gives the joy which we give to the circumstance.
The pleasure of life is according to the man who lives it, and not according to the work or the place.
Manners are the happy way of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage. They form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dewdrops which give such depth to the morning meadows.
If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
There are men who, by their sympathetic attractions, carry nations with them, and lead the activity of the human race.
We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
Women see better than men. Men see lazily, if they do not expect to act. Women see quite without any wish to act.
Our health is our sound relation to external objects; our sympathy with external being.
By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.
Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age.
A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.
Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can. Having found them, we shall then hate them for it.
Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in.
A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad.
If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
Every action is measured by the depth of the sentiment from which it proceeds.
Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is a million fathoms deep.
It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances.
Alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men; that is genius.
Thought is the property of him who can entertain it, and of him who can adequately place it.
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you lived; that is to have succeeded.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature.
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
The sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions.
The secret of education is respecting the pupil.
To be great is to be misunderstood.
Whoso be a man must be a nonconformist.
Art is a jealous mistress.
