Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

The years teach much the days never know.

Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.

The one thing in the world of value is the active soul.

We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! — it seems to say, — there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.

The power which resides in man is new in nature and none but he knows what that is which he can do nor does he until he has tried.

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.

Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.

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

A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope and eloquence in all whom she approaches.

God enters by a private door into every individual.

The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.

Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.

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

The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides.

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

Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.

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

Fear is an instructor of great sagacity and the herald of all revolutions.

An institution is the lengthening shadow of one man.

Another point of economy is to look for seed of the same kind as you sow, and not to hope to buy one kind with an other kind. Friendship buys friendship; justice, justice; military merit, military success...Yet there is commonly a confusion of expectations on these points. Hotspur lives for the moment, praises himself for it, and despises Furlong, that he does not. Hotspur of course is poor, and Furlong is a good provider. The odd circumstance is that Hotspur thinks it a superiority in himself, this improvidence, which ought to be rewarded with Furlong's lands.

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire.

Your actions speak so loudly, I cannot hear what you are saying.

Ah if the rich were rich as the poor fancy riches!

A man is known by the books he reads.

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

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

Those who stay away from the election think that one vote will do no good. 'Tis but one step more to think one vote will do no harm.

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

She shows us only surfaces but Nature is a million fathoms deep.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

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

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

When you were born you were crying and everyone else was smiling. Live your life so at the end, your're the one who is smiling and everyone else is crying.

Men are what their mothers made them.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

When there is no vision people perish.

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.

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

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

It is not the length of life, but the depth.

Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods arrive.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Every man is a consumer and ought to be a producer.

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.

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.

Wit makes its own welcome and levels all distinctions.

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

Nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.

We look wishfully to emergencies to eventful revolutionary times ... and think how easy to have taken our part when the drum was rolling and the house was burning over our heads.

Five great enemies to peace inhabit us: avarice ambition envy anger and pride. If those enemies were to be banished we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claim to praise.

We do not live an equal life but one of contrasts and patchwork now a little joy then a sorrow now a sin then a generous or brave action.

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

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants and to serve them one's self?

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.