Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

» The years teach much which the days never knew.

» All mankind love a lover.

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

» We aim above the mark to hit the mark.

» It is not length of life, but depth of life.

» All life is an experiment.

» People only see what they are prepared to see.

» Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

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

» Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

» Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.

» Who you are speaks so loudly I can't hear what you're saying.

» The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

» God enters by a private door into every individual.

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

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

» As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

» Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

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

» We are always getting ready to live but never living.

» Every burned book enlightens the world.

» There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.

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

» Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

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

» The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.

» Earth laughs in flowers.

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

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

» Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?

» The first wealth is health.

» You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

» Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

» Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.

» Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.

» I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

» Science does not know its debt to imagination.

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

» We must be our own before we can be another's.

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

» In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.

» A man is what he thinks about all day long.

» Beauty without expression is boring.

» Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.

» Every artist was first an amateur.

» Hitch your wagon to a star.

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

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

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

» Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

» I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.

» We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.

» A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

» All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.

» Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.

» The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

» The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.

» The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.

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

» An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.

» Beauty is an outward gift, which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.

» Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.

» People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else.

» People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.

» The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.

» There is a tendency for things to right themselves.

» There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

» Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.

» Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.

» Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

» Getting old is a fascination thing. The older you get, the older you want to get.

» For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.

» Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

» Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

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

» Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.

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

» No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

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

» What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

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

» Make yourself necessary to somebody.

» Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

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

» Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

» Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

» Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.

» Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

» As soon as there is life there is danger.

» In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.

» Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.

» Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

» One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

» We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

» Every man I meet is in some way my superior.

» We are wiser than we know.

» Always do what you are afraid to do.

» Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

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

» The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.

» Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

» If a man can... make a better mousetrap, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

» Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.

» A great man is always willing to be little.

» It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 'always do what you are afraid to do.'

» Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

» All diseases run into one, old age.

» Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.

» Our best thoughts come from others.

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

» A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.

» We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.

» No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

» Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.

» Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

» Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.

» Washington, where an insignificant individual may trespass on a nation's time.

» This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

» Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

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

» Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.

» Reality is a sliding door.

» Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.

» The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

» Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

» Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

» Good men must not obey the laws too well.

» Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.

» Money often costs too much.

» As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.

» Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

» A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.

» A man in debt is so far a slave.

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

» Children are all foreigners.

» Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

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

» Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

» The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

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

» When we quarrel, how we wish we had been blameless.

» Genius always finds itself a century too early.

» The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.

» Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.

» Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

» To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

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

» God screens us evermore from premature ideas.

» Be an opener of doors.

» Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

» The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

» The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

» Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

» The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

» Nature hates calculators.

» We acquire the strength we have overcome.

» Pictures must not be too picturesque.

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

» The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

» To be great is to be misunderstood.

» We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

» America is another name for opportunity.

» No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

» Every hero becomes a bore at last.

» The ancestor of every action is a thought.

» Men are what their mothers made them.

» For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.

» Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.

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

» Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

» When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

» Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

» The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

» Revolutions go not backward.

» The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

» The highest revelation is that God is in every man.

» Nothing external to you has any power over you.

» Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee.

» What you are comes to you.

» Every wall is a door.

» What we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.

» Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.

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

» Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.

» As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

» Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting.

» The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.

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

» People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

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

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

» Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.

» Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.

» For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

» But a compassion for that which is not and cannot be useful and lovely, is degrading and futile.

» There are eyes, to be sure, that give no more admission into the man than blueberries.

» Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

» Power and speed be hands and feet.

» There is always safety in valor.

» It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

» It is a greater joy to see the author's author, than himself.

» Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.

» Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.

» Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.

» Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

» Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.

» Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.

» Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

» There are other measures of self-respect for a man, than the number of clean shirts he puts on every day.

» There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

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

» A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him; wherever he goes.

» A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts.

» There is also something excellent in every audience, the capacity of virtue. They are ready to be beatified.

» There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

» A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

» There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.

» There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.

» A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.

» Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

» There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

» There is a good ear, in some men, that draws supplies to virtue out of very indifferent nutriment.

» Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail.

» It is my desire, in the office of a Christian minister, to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart. Having said this, I have said all.

» Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.

» Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman, repose in energy.

» We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.

» It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.

» We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.

» Give a boy address and accomplishments and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes.

» We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

» Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

» People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

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

» The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.

» Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

» Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.

» O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

» We see God face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature.

» If in the least particular one could derange the order of nature, who would accept the gift of life?

» It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.

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

» But genius is the power to labor better and more availably. Deserve thy genius: exalt it.

» In America and Europe the nomadism is of trade and curiosity.

» Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

» The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul.

» The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.

» If we tire of the saints, Shakspeare is our city of refuge.

» Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.

» The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.

» I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.

» We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more.

» Divine persons are character born, or, to borrow a phrase from Napoleon, they are victory organized.

» Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.

» The years teach much which the days never know.

» The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

» The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.

» Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.

» Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.

» The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.

» People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

» The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.

» The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

» Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual.

» I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

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

» The faith that stands on authority is not faith.

» In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout, and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep.

» Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.

» In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.

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Who Said: "To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it." Click To See

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"Life has no limitations, except the ones you make." - Les Brown

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