Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes: 116

• To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

• For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

• Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

• Pictures must not be too picturesque.

• With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.

• It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

  Emerson in His Journals

• Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

• Every artist was first an amateur.

• All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

• What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

• Always do what you are afraid to do.

• Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

• Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the 'Not Me,' that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, 'Nature.

• Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.

• What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.

• When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

• Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

  Self Reliance

• The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, not the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship.

• The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

• I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

• Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.

• In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

• All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

• Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

• Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.

• It is not the length of life, but the depth.

• It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

  The Complete Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.

• Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

• Make the most of yourself....for that is all there is of you.

• Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

• If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

• Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

  Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with Annotations - 1841-1844

• A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.

• Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

• What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

• Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

  Self-Reliance

• You become what you think about all day long.

• Envy is ignorance, Imitation is Suicide.

  Self-Reliance

• The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn

• Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

  Emerson in His Journals

• Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting some on yourself.

• Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.

• The good news is that the moment you decide that what you know is more important than what you have been taught to believe, you will have shifted gears in your quest for abundance. Success comes from within, not from without.

• Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.

  Self-Reliance and Other Essays

• There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

• Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.

• I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

  The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson

• If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

  Nature and Selected Essays

• The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

• That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.

• Sorrow looks back, Worry looks around, Faith looks up

• Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

• He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

• Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.

• Love, and you shall be loved.

• None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

• When you were born you were crying and everyone else was smiling. Live your life so at the end, your're the one who is smiling and everyone else is crying.

• Even in the mud and scum of things, something always, always sings.

• The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret.

• If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and adore.

• Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

• In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

• There is one other reason for dressing well, namely that dogs respect it, and will not attack you in good clothes.

• Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

• He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.

• Life consists of what man is thinking about all day.

• We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.

  Essays Including Essays, First & Second Series, English Traits, Nature & Considerations by the Way

• It is one of the beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

• The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.

• Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.

• Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest.

• Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

  The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.

  Letters and Social Aims

• Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

• The reward of a thing well done is having done it.

• The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.

• I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

  Self-Reliance and Other Essays

• What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

• The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship

  Nature

• At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say,—'Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act.

  The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson

• We are wiser than we know.

• Be an opener of doors

• Books are for nothing but to inspire

• Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.

• People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad.

• Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

• 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.

• No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. 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 is what is against it.

• The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.

• Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.

• Love what is simple and beautiful. These are the essentials.

  The Tao of Emerson the Tao of Emerson

• Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds. Men live the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which they never enter, and with their hands on the door-latch they die outside.

• Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.

• Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.

  The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson

• All mankind love a lover.

• Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

• The secret of poetry is never explained - is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, & the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, & knows not that they are such. 'Tis as easy as breath. 'Tis like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, & none knows what it is.

• Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it--else it is none.

• Every word was once a poem.

• We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities.

• So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man,When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' The youth whispers, 'I can.

  Emerson: Poems

• The only way to have a friend is to be one.

• A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

• He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.

• Beauty is the virtue of the body as virtue is the beauty of the soul

• To fill the hour──that is happiness.

• Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.

  The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson

• By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

• I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today.

  The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson

• A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

• The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.

  The Portable Emerson

• His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong

• Quotation confesses inferiority.

  Uncollected Writings

• A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

• Napoleon said of Massena, that he was not himself until the battle began to go against him; then, when the dead began to fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination, and he put on terror and victory as a robe. So it is in rugged crises, in unweariable endurance, and in aims which put sympathy out of question, that the angel is shown.

  Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume I: Nature, Addresses, and Lectures