Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Successful is the person who has lived well, laughed often and loved much, who has gained the respect of children, who leaves the world better than they found it, who has never lacked appreciation for the earth's beauty, who never fails to look for the best in others or give the best of themselves.

Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises. 'Tis the vulgar great who come dizened with gold and jewels. Real kings hide away their crowns in their wardrobes, and affect a plain and poor exterior.

Is not, indeed, every man a student, and do not all things exist for the student's behoof?

Let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.

There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue.

The effects of opposition are wonderful. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing of a threat, men to whom a crisis, which intimidates and paralyzes the majority, comes as graceful and beloved as a bride!

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

A child reminds us that playtime is an essential part of our daily routine.

If you would know what nobody knows, read what everybody reads, just one year afterwards.

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

The whole course of things goes to teach us faith. We need only obey. There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word. . . . Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which flows into you as life, place yourself in the full center of that flood, then you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment.

The cure for false theology is motherwit. Forget your books and traditions, and obey your moral perceptions at this hour.

Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.

But dare rather to quit the platform, plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, & swim far, so shall you come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience, that shall explain & overlook the old. Trust your emotion.

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.

A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and virtue, will purge the eyes to understanding her text.

In all things I would have the island of a man inviolate. Let us sit apart as the gods, talking from peak to peak all round Olympus. No degree of affection need invade this religion.

When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strange that society should be disheartened and sensualized by unbelief.

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

It does not to dwell on dreams and forget to live, but it is equally foolish to ignore the past – never forget.

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.

The land is the appointed remedy for whatever is false and fantastic in our culture. The continent we inhabit is to be physic andfood for our mind, as well as our body. The land, with its tranquilizing, sanative influences, is to repair the errors of a scholastic and traditional education, and bring us to just relations with men and things.

Sympathy is a supporting atmosphere, and in it we unfold easily and well.

Words are finite expressions of the infinite mind.

Homeopathy is insignificant as an act of healing, but of great value as criticism on the hygeia or medical practice of the time.

The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.

At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish.

A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision, his living is natural and poetic.

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.

Talent finds its models, methods, and ends in society, exists for exhibition, and goes to the soul only for power to work. Genius is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture from within.

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.

There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity i am bought and sold; for them i will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; - though i confess with shame i sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by i shall have the manhood to withhold.

Hospitality consists in a little fire, a little food, and an immense quiet

It is commonly observed that a sudden wealth, like a prize drawn in a lottery or a large bequest to a poor family, does not permanently enrich. They have served no apprenticeship to wealth, and with the rapid wealth come rapid claims which they do not know how to deny, and the treasure is quickly dissipated.

The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-government, and leave the individual, for all code, to the rewards and penalties of his own constitution, which work with more energy than we believe, whilst we depend on artificial restraints.

Every discourse is an approximate answer: but it is of small consequence, that we do not get it into verbs and nouns, whilst it abides for contemplation forever.

Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.

Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles.

...most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.

The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself. For the real price is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen.

We are shut up in school and college recitation rooms for ten to fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing. We cannot use our hands, or our legs, or our eyes, or our arms. We do not know an edible root in the woods. We cannot tell our course by the stars, nor the hour of day by the sun. It is well if we can swim and skate. We are afraid of a horse or a cow, of a dog, of a cat, of a spider. Far better was the Roman rule to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing.

Politics is a deleterious profession, like some poisonous handicrafts.

What you persist in doing gets easier. The task hasn't changed, but your ability to do it has increased.

The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics or practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers' hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows in poverty, necessity and darkness.

The world leaves no track in space, and the greatest action of man no mark in the vast idea.

You cannot make a cheap palace.