Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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Reality is a sliding door.
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Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
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We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous society the influence of character is in its infancy.
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A great man is always willing to be little.
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Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
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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.
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To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.
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The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
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It may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?
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In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.
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Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.
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I wiped away the weeds and foam, And fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.
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The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.
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Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
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I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
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Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, And marching single in an endless file, Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
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Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.
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It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.
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In actions of enthusiasm, this drawback appears: but in those lower activities, which have no higher aim than to make us more comfortable and more cowardly, in actions of cunning, actions that steal and lie, actions that divorce the speculative from the practical faculty, and put a ban on reason and sentiment, there is nothing else but drawback and negation.
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A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue.
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Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.
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Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.
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Why should we make account of time, or of magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows how to play with them as a young child plays with graybeards and in churches.
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Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die.