Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Luck is just another word for tenacity of purpose.

I think it is the best of humanity that goes out to walk. In happy hours, I think all affairs may be wisely postponed for walking.

Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls.

Nature never hurries: atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work. The lesson one learns from yachting or planting is the manners of Nature; patience with the delays of wind and sun, delays of the seasons, bad weather, excess or lack of water.

Success in your work, the finding a better method, the better understanding that insures the better performing is hat and coat, is food and wine, is fire and horse and health and holiday. At least, I find that any success in my work has the effect on my spirits of all these.

In nature nothing can be given. All things are sold.

Moderation in all things, especially moderation.

Men who know the same things are not long the best company for each other.

The poem is a confession of faith.

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

The wise man in the storm prays God not for safety from danger but for deliverance from fear. It is the storm within which endangers him[,] not the storm without.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety. Finish every 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, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

Presently we pass to some other object which rounds itself into a whole as did the first; for example, a well-laid garden; and nothing seems worth doing but the laying~out of gardens.

The only true gifts are a portion of yourself.

In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul?

Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves.

It is greatest to believe and to hope well of the world, because he who does so, quits the world of experience, and makes the world he lives in.

Although this garrulity of advising is born with us, I confess that life is rather a subject of wonder, than of didactics. So muchfate, so much irresistible dictation from temperament and unknown inspiration enter into it, that we doubt we can say anything out of our own experience whereby to help each other.

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

Love, and you shall be loved.

If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the way of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired.

And dazzling memory revive.Refresh the faded tints, Recut the aged prints, And write my old adventures, with the pen Which, on the first day, drew Upon the tablets blue The dancing Pleiads, and the eternal men.

There can be no excess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty.

Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity, and not for life.

Beware of too much good staying in your hand. It will fast corrupt and worm worms. Pay it away quickly in some sort.

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.

We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.

For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe.

The child realizes to every man his own earliest remembrance, and so supplies a defect in our education, or enables us to live over the unconscious history with a sympathy so tender as to be almost personal experience.

The world of men show like a comedy without laughter: populations, interests, government, history; 't is all toy figures in a toyhouse.

My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady.

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.

All history is the decline of war, though the slow decline. All that society has yet gained is mitigation; the doctrine of the right of war still remains.

As gas-light is found to be the best nocturnal police, so the universe protects itself by pitiless publicity.

The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought.

Civilization depends on morality.

Goodness that preaches undoes itself.

Duty grows everywhere--like children, like grass.

Good as is discourse, silence is better, and shames it. The length of the discourse indicates the distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the hearer. If they were at a perfect understanding in any part, no words would be necessary thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be suffered.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.

Thanks to the morning light, Thanks to the foaming sea, To the uplands of New Hampshire, To the green-haired forest free.

But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God.

The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musican, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce.

The Sun is the sole inconsumable fireAnd God is the sole inexhaustible Giver.

Wise men read very sharply all of your private history in your look and gait and behavior.

Difference of opinion is the one crime which kings never forgive.

People only see what they are prepared to see.