Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.
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Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?
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They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt; And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
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I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.
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Fear not, then, thou child infirm, There's no god dare wrong a worm.
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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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Henceforward I am the truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities.
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Every burned book enlightens the world.
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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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Talents differ; all is well and wisely put; If I cannot carry forests on my back, Neither can you crack a nut.
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People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else.
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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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Blessed are those who have no talent!
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Life is too short to waste The critic bite or cynic bark, Quarrel, or reprimand; 'Twill soon be dark; Up! mind thine own aim, and God speed the mark!
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I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
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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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Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
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But these young scholars who invade our hills, Bold as the engineer who fells the wood, And travelling often in the cut he makes, Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names.
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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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The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?
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A mollusk is a cheap edition of man with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster-bank or among the seaweed.
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Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.
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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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Self-trust is the first secret of success.