Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes - Page 12

Men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places.

Every man passes his life in the search after friendship.

Miss Austen’s novels … seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer … is marriageableness.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance that imitation is suicide that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion.

It facilitates labor and thought so much that there is always the temptation in large schools to omit the endless task oftmeeting the wants of each single mind, and to govern by steam. But it is at frightful cost. Our modes of Education aim to expedite, to save labor; to do for masses what cannot be done for masses, what must be done reverently, one by one: say rather, the whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil.

Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands. This can only be by his preferring truth to his past apprehension of truth; and his alert acceptance of it, from whatever quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws, his relations to society, his Christianity, his world may at any time be superseded and decease.

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

There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.

The wise man in the storm prays God not for safety from danger but for deliverance from fear.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.

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.

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.

There are books which take rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

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

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

Misunderstood! It is a right fool's word. 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.

Outside among your fellows among strangers you must preserve appearances a hundred things you cannot do but inside the terrible freedom!

Live wastes itself while we are preparing to live.

To laugh often and much,to win the respect of the intelligent peopleand the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest criticsand endure the betrayal of false friends;to appreciate beauty;to find the best in others; to leave the world.

Take egotism out and you would castrate the benefactor.

All history is but the lengthened shadow of a great man.

Pain indolence sterility endless ennui have also their lesson for you.

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.

Yes, but does Maine have anything to SAY to Florida?

To laugh often and much;to win the respect of intelligent peopleand the affection of children,to leave the world a better place,to know even one life has breathed easierbecause you have lived,this is to have succeeded.

Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.

Speak your latent conviction. . . Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

The shoemaker makes a good shoe because he makes nothing else.

Nothing is more simple than greatness indeed to be simple is to be great.

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please-you can never have both.