Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
-
Genius borrows nobly. When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: 'Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life'.
-
Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.
-
Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
-
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.
-
O tenderly the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire; One morn is in the mighty heaven, And one in our desire.
-
Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.
-
Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.
-
Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.
-
The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.
-
Wherever the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation.
-
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
-
Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.
-
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so.
-
What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.
-
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
-
For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.
-
In this pleasing contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt it, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.
-
Men are what their mothers made them.
-
A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.
-
There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.
-
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.
-
Hitch your wagon to a star.
-
I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.
-
Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.