Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson
American Poet
1803-1882
Founder of the Transcendental Movement and author of classic essays as Self-Reliance, Nature, and The American Scholar.
A great man is always willing to be little.
Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.
Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.
Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.
Every man I meet is in some way my superior.
Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.
No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.
Our best thoughts come from others.
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.
There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.
Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.
Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.
All mankind love a lover
Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.
Every artist was first an amateur.
Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.
Give a boy address and accomplishments and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes.
In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.
Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.
Life is our dictionary.
Make yourself necessary to somebody.
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.
Passion rebuilds the world for the youth.
It makes all things alive and significant.
People that seem so glorious are all show;
underneath they are like everyone else.
The age of a woman doesn’t mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.
The faith that stands on authority is not faith.
The search after the great men is the dream of youth,
and the most serious occupation of manhood.
The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.
Use what language you will,
you can never say anything but what you are.
When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.
Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.
Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.
Character is always known.
Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls.
Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.
Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.
He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.
If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.
In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.
Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.
Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.
Men are what their mothers made them.
Nature hates calculators.
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.
Genius always finds itself a century too early.
Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.
Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.
Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
Our best thoughts come from others.
People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.
Reality is a sliding door.
Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.
I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.
It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.
Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.
For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.
I hate quotations!
Tell me what you know.
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.
Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.
Nature is the incarnation of thought. The world is the mind precipitated.
Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
We aim above the mark to hit the mark.
What you are comes to you.
You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.
A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty
appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue.
As soon as there is life there is danger.
Children are all foreigners.
Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
It is not length of life, but depth of life.
Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.
Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be
Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.
The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
The years teach much which the days never know.
We are wiser than we know
With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.
Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.
The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.
The reward of a thing well done is having done it.
We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.
Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.
Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.
All diseases run into one, old age.
Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.
Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.
In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.
Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.
Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
To be great is to be misunderstood.
Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?
Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon.
We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.
The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.
People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.
When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.
Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one’s self?
Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.
Flowers…
are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.
The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.
A man is what he thinks about all day long.
Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.
Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.
Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.
Science does not know its debt to imagination.
The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.
Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.
Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.
Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.
Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.
We acquire the strength we have overcome.
There is always safety in valor.
The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.
What we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.
A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Every particular in nature,
a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time
is related to the whole,
and partakes of the perfection of the whole.
Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.
We must be our own before we can be another’s.
Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.
Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.
For everything you have missed,
you have gained something else,
and for everything you gain,
you lose something else.
In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.
Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.
Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.
Money often cost too much.
One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.
The earth laughs in flowers.
The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation.
The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.
As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.
Beauty is an outward gift, which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.
Cause and effect are two sides of one fact. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Getting old is a fascination thing. The older you get, the older you want to get.
The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.
All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.
Pictures must not be too picturesque.
We are born believing.
A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.
What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.
The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.
A good indignation brings out all one’s powers.
All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.
Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.
Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.
I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.
Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.
All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.
Doing well is the result of doing good. That’s what capitalism is all about.
We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
Beauty without expression is boring.
A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.
Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.
Every wall is a door.
In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.
People only see what they are prepared to see.
The ancestor of every action is a thought.
The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear.
There are other measures of self-respect for a man, than the number of clean shirts he puts on every day.
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
Without electricity, the air would rot.
The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence
Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.
A man in debt is so far a slave.
The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.
Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.
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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson Publications
Self-Reliance and Other Essays
The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Representative Men: Seven Lectures
Compensation
The Over-Soul