Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes - Page 7

Ralph Waldo Emerson“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams

If a man has good corn or wood or boards or pigs to sell or can make better chairs or knives crucibles or church organs than anybody else you will find a broad hardbeaten road to his house though it be in the woods.

The surest poison is time.

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

Great men are they who see that the spiritual is stronger than any material force that thoughts rule the world.

We take care of our health we lay up money we make our roof tight and our clothing sufficient but who provides wisely that he shall not be wanting in the best property of all-friends.

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

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

If you put a chain around the neck of a slave the other end fastens itself around your own.

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

Fame is proof that people are gullible.

Nature wishes that woman should attract man, yet she often cunningly moulds into her face a little sarcasm, which seems to say, 'Yes, I am willing to attract, but to attract a little better kind of a man than any I yet behold

Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it

Sanity is very rare every man almost and every woman has a dash of madness.

Every man is a borrower and a mimic life is theatrical and literature a quotation.

I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live.

Do not be too timid and squeamish. ... All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust So near is God to man. When Duty whispers low Thou must The youth replies I can.

A sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

A woman's strength is the irresistible might of weakness.

All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.

There are three wants which can never be satisfied: that of the rich who want something more that of the sick who want something different and that of the traveler who says "Anywhere but here."

We are like travelers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs.

A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

Every artist was first an amateur.

People wish to be settled only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

Envy is ignorance, Imitation is Suicide.

The efforts which we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.

There is no strong performance without a little fanaticism in the performer.

O Lord! Unhappy is the man whom man can make unhappy.

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.

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

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.

To fill the hour and leave no crevice ... that is happiness.

Books are for nothing but to inspire

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

Some thoughts always find us young and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.

The secret of poetry is never explained - is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, & the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, & knows not that they are such. 'Tis as easy as breath. 'Tis like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, & none knows what it is.

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

Poverty Frost Famine Rain Disease are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense.

Let us even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying, "Who are you? Unhand me: I will be dependent no more." Ah! seest thou not, O brother, that thus we part only to meet again on a higher platform, and only be more each other's, because we are more our own?

The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party but they say nothing and if we do not use the gifts they bring they carry them as silently away.

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.

Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.

Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon balls and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again though it contradict everything you said today.

Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment.

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

The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.

The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.

Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion.

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

If the single man plants himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abides, this huge world will come around to him.

The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.