Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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Always do what you are afraid to do.
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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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Seeing only what is fair, Sipping only what is sweet, Thou dost mock at fate and care.
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I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
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The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.
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Of what use is genius, if the organ is too convex or too concave and cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon of human life?
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Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
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It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.
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I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.
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The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.
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Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.
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The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?
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Every burned book enlightens the world.
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Do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
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Circles, like the soul, are neverending and turn round and round without a stop
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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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Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.
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People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
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Heartily know, When half-gods go, The gods arrive.
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Never read any book that is not a year old.
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The soul is subject to dollars.
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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.
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So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can.
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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.