Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour?

That which builds is better than that which is built.

No performance is worth loss of geniality. 'Tis a cruel price we pay for certain fancy goods called fine arts and philosophy.

Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command.

Then climate is a great impediment to idle persons; we often resolve to give up the care of the weather, but still we regard the clouds and the rain.

Men are lenses through which we read our own minds.

Philanthropic and religious bodies do not commonly make their executive officers out of saints.

Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are.

The farmer after sacrificing pleasure, taste, freedom, thought, love, to his work, turns out often a bankrupt, like the merchant.This result might well seem astounding. All this drudgery, from cockcrowing to starlight, for all these years, to end in mortgages and the auctioneer's flag, and removing from bad to worse. It is time to have the thing looked into, and with a sifting criticism ascertained who is the fool.

I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.

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

The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.

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. It is not the part of men, but of fanatics, or of mathematicians, if you will, to say, that, the shortness of life considered, it is not worth caring whether for so short a duration we were sprawling in want, or sitting high. Since our office is with moments, let us husband them.

We all need someone who can help us do what we already can.

I am always insincere, as always knowing there are other moods.

Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.

...in the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in the streets or villages...in the woods we return to reason and faith.

How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without place to insert an atom--in graceful succession, in equal fullness, in balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and boundless. It will not be dissected, nor unraveled, nor shown.

The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide. Him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him because he did not need it.

What you are shouts at me so loudly that I can't hear a word you say.

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, while he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.

Be an opener of doors

In a tavern everybody puts on airs except the landlord.

The finest people marry the two sexes in their own person.

The best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions; and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien.

In failing circumstances no one can be relied on to keep their integrity.

Marriage is the perfection which love aimed at, ignorant of what it sought.

It is noticed, that the consideration of the great periods and spaces of astronomy induces a dignity of mind, and an indifferenceto death.

There are geniuses in trade as well as in war, or the state, or letters; and the reason why this or that man is fortunate is not to be told. It lies in the man: that is all anybody can tell you about it.

But harder still it has proved to resist and rule the dragon Money, with his paper wings. Chancellors and Boards of Trade, Pitt, Peel, and Bobinson, and their parliaments, and their whole generation, adopted false principles, and went to their graves in the belief that they were enriching the country which they were impoverishing.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

The household is a school of power. There, within the door, learn the tragi-comedy of human life.

Taking to pieces is the trade of those who cannot construct.

The ornaments of our homes are the friends that visit it

Vigor is contagious, and whatever makes us either think or feel strongly adds to our power and enlarges our field of action.

To give money to a sufferer is only a come-off. It is only a postponement of the real payment, a bribe paid for silence, a creditsystem in which a paper promise to pay answers for the time instead of liquidation. We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man.

Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not "Devil's wine," but God's wine.

It is in bad taste," is the most formidable word an Englishman can pronounce.

The great majority of men grow up and grow old in seeming and following.

It's a luxury to be understood.

The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.

Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect. A man does not see, that, as he eats, so he thinks: as he deals, so he is, and so he appears; he does not see that his son is the son of his thoughts and of his actions; that fortunes are not exceptions but fruits; that relation and connection are not somewhere and sometimes, but everywhere and always; no miscellany, no exemption, no anomaly,--but method, and an even web; and what comes out, that was put in.

Speak the affirmative; emphasize your choice by utter ignoring of all that you reject.

To believe in luck, if it were not a solecism so to use the word believe, is skepticism.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

Deep insight will always, like Nature, ultimate its thought in a thing.

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend

A rush of thoughts is the only conceivable prosperity that can come to us.