Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes - Page 4

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

The student is to read history actively not passively.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn

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

For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?

Beauty without expression tires.

Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.

With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. ... Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon balls and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again though it contradicts everything you said today.

Whatever course you decide upon there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires....courage.

Some of your hurts you have cured And the sharpest you still have survived But what torments of grief you endured From the evil which never arrived.

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

The cultivated man wise to know and bold to perform is the end to which nature works.

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

Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it no excess of explanation and it is full of suggestions the raw material of possible poems and histories.

As soon as there is life there is danger.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.

Glittering generalities! They are blazing ubiquities.

I pay the School Master but 'tis the school boys that educate my son.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things

The merit claimed for the Anglican Church is that if you let it alone it will let you alone.

The greatest man in history was the poorest.

An institution is the lengthening shadow of one man.

No man can have society upon his own terms.

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

Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. As to methods there may be a million and then some but the principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods ignoring principles is sure to have trouble.

In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, -- he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me

Virtues are in the popular estimate rather the exception than the rule.

What I must do is all that concerns me,

Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.

Sorrow looks back, Worry looks around, Faith looks up

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

They should own who can administer, not they who hoard and conceal; not they who, the greater proprietors they are, are only the greater beggars, but they whose work carves out work for more, opens a path for all. For he is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people are poor; and how to give all access to the masterpieces of art and nature is the problem of civilization.

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

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

The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education but the means of education.

It is proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.

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

On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested,--"But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if everything were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.

There are people who have an appetite for grief pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation.

What is success? To laugh often and much To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends To appreciate beauty To find the best in others To leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child a garden patch or a redeemed social condition To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived That is to have succeeded.

Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill!

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

That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.

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

The cramping influence of a hard formalist on a young child in repressing his spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding, and that without producing indignation, but only fear and obedience, and even much sympathy with his tyranny, - is a familiar fact explained to the child when he becomes a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of his youth is himself a child tyrannized over by those names and words and forma, of whose influence he was merely the organ to the youth.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood Their flag to April's breeze unfurl'd Here once the embattl'd farmers stood And fired the shot heard round the world.

We are reformers in spring and summer in autumn and winter we stand by the old reformers in the morning conservers at night. Reform is affirmative conservatism negative conservatism goes for comfort reform for truth.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

The question is whether suicide is the way out or the way in.

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.

True love transcends the unworthy object, and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its independency the surer.

Every burned book enlightens the world.

When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself Which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? the debt of money or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature? For you, O broker, there is not other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred;

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. . . . The force of character is cumulative.

Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining but they make them artificial.

Don't be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams.

Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.

The years teach us much, which the days never knew.