Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes - Page 6

The years teach much the days never know.

The high prize of life the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit which finds him in employment and happiness.

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

Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits.

The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.

I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever only rejoices me, and the heart appoints

Obedience alone gives the right to command.

Pride ruined the angels.

Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken.

What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face and behaviour of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces, we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me.

The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.

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

Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.

there is no planet, sun, or star could hold you if you but knew what you are.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,Here once the embattled farmers stood,And fired the shot heard round the world.The foe long since in silence slept;Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;And Time the ruined bridge has sweptDown the dark stream which seaward creeps.On this green bank, by this soft stream,We set to-day a votive stone;That memory may their deed redeem,When, like our sires, our sons are gone.Spirit, that made those heroes dareTo die, and leave their children free,Bid Time and Nature gently spareThe shaft we raise to them and thee.

It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourself.

Shallow men believe in luck wise and strong men in cause and effect.

There is a difference between truly listening and waiting for your turn to talk.

Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions. "In the morning, — solitude;" said Pythagoras; that Nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company, and that her favorite may make acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to serious and abstracted thought. 'Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to time as benefactors: and the wise instructor will press this point of securing to the young soul in the disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and habits of solitude.

Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds. Men live the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which they never enter, and with their hands on the door-latch they die outside.

Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. He is isolated among his contemporaries by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.

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

Adopt the pace of nature her secret is patience.

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple which has no superfluous parts which exactly answers its ends.

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

If a man carefully examines his thoughts he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future. His well-being is always ahead.

Every reform was once a private opinion and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

Teach that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character.

Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover.

Though I am weak yet God when prayed Cannot withhold his conquering aid.

We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves'-neck lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things, which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at appropriation and use.

You have first an instinct then an opinion then a knowledge as the plant has root bud and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end though you can render no reason.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.

When a man is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something.

Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

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

Extremes meet and there is no better example than the naughtiness of humility.

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

Money is representative, and follows the nature and fortunes of the owner...The farmer is covetous of his dollar, and with reason. It is no waif to him. He knows how many strokes of labor it represents. His bones ache with the days' work that earned it. He knows how much land it represents - how much rain, frost and sunshine. He knows that, in the dollar, he gives you so much discretion and patience, so much hoeing and threshing. Try to lift his dollar; you must lift all that weight. In the city, where money follows the skit of a pen or a lucky rise in exchange, it comes to be looked on as light.

Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool.

I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life.

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

His heart was as great as the world but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

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

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

It is doubtless a vice to turn one's eyes inward too much but I am my own comedy and tragedy.

A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss.

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.

What lies behind us & what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent we have discovered afterward that much was accomplished and much was begun in us.

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

It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man having once shown himself capable of original writing is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore it if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.