Emerson, Ralph Waldo
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Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Contradiction
If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Books - Reading
Many might go to Heaven with half the labor they go to hell.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Heaven
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Contradiction
Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Decisions
Never read any book that is not a year old.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Books - Reading
Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Books - Reading
Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Curiosity
It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Crafts
Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Common Sense
As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Civilization
Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Destiny
Curses always recoil on the head of him who imprecates them. If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Curses
In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Consultants
When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Communication
Don t be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don t bewail and moan. Omit the negative propositions. Challenge us with incessant affirmatives. Don t waste yourself in rejection, or bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Cynics and Cynicism
Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Drugs
Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Choice
The eloquent man is he who is no eloquent speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Eloquence
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Difficulties
There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Difficulties
There are three wants which never can be satisfied: that of the rich, who wants something more; that of the sick, who wants something different; and that of the traveler, who says, Anywhere but here.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Dissatisfaction
We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Courtesy
Life is short, but there is always time for courtesy.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Courtesy
Courtesy Life be not so short but that there is always time for courtesy.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Courtesy
Can anybody remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Difficulties
Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Difficulties
Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Charity
Do not tell me of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Charity
Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Censorship
I pay the schoolmaster, but it is the school boys who educate my son.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Education
An empire is an immense egotism.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Empire
The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Disasters
All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Commitment
Sunday is the core of our civilization, dedicated to thought and reverence.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Civilization
One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Colleges and Universities
Civilization depends on morality.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Civilization
There never was a child so lovely, but his mother was glad to get him asleep.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Children
Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Conceit
There are books which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Books - Classics
There is nothing capricious in nature and the implanting of a desire indicates that its gratification is in the constitution of the creature that feel it.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Desire
Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one s self?
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Desire
There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace, and not pollute the morning.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Complaints and Complaining
We are as much informed of a writer s genius by what he selects as by what he originates.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Choice
Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Books - Reading
The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a gingerbread dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame, by all these attitudes and exertions --an end of the first importance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Children
That which builds is better than that which is built.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Creativity
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Honor
Courage charms us, because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Courage
Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Education
Do that which is assigned to you and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Duty
One lesson we learn early, that in spite of seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are disappointed and angry if we find that we are premature, and that their watches are slower than ours. In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Conformity
Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Colleges and Universities
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Books - Reading
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Consistency
Courage consists in equality to the problem before us.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Courage
As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Control
Nothing external to you has any power over you.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Control
The ship of heaven guides itself and will not accept a wooden rudder.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Dependence
If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Bragging
We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Books - Reading
There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to it.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Bragging
Every man is a consumer and ought to be a producer.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Business
It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Debt
A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Courage
He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Conventionality
Blame is safer than praise.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Critics and Criticism
Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Critics and Criticism
Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Critics and Criticism
When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Courage
The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Colleges and Universities
As men s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Creeds
The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call common sense; a man of a strong affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic. There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune in making money. Men talk as if there were some magic about this. He knows that all goes on the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent -- for every effect a perfect cause -- and that good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Business
The pest of society are the egotist, they are dull and bright, sacred and profane, course and fine. It is a disease that like the flu falls on all constitutions.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Egotism
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.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Courage
What a new face courage puts on everything!
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Courage
Half a man s wisdom goes with his courage.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Courage
I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Dress
Culture is one thing and varnish is another.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Culture
Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Diets and Dieting
The secret in education lies in respecting the student.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Education
Nothing astonishes people so much as common sense and plain dealing.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Common Sense
All diseases run into one. Old age.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Disease
So of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more it remains.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Cheerfulness
A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Cynics and Cynicism
There is a time in every man s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Education
People wish to be settled. It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Change
Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Books - Reading
Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; for causes which are unpenetrated.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Destiny
There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Books - Reading
For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something else.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Compensation
We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly-full of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Education
Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Friends and Friendship
No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Greatness
Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Greatness
Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
God
The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Friends and Friendship
We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Friends and Friendship
Liberty is slow fruit. It is never cheap; it is made difficult because freedom is the accomplishment and perfectness of man.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Freedom
The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Greatness
The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Greatness
The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Greatness
It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Honesty
Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Exercise
He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Friends and Friendship
To be great is to be misunderstood.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Greatness
Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Friends and Friendship
Whatever limits us we call fate.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Fate
A true friend is somebody who can make us do what we can.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Friends and Friendship
His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Heart
I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Food and Eating
A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Faces
My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock should find the time in my face.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Guests
If you believe in fate, believe in it, at least, for your good.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Fate
Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Fate
We aim above the mark to hit the mark.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Goals
Our best history is still poetry.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
History and Historians
A great man stands on God. A small man on a great man.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Greatness
Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Exercise
A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Friends and Friendship
Some will always be above others. Destroy the inequality today, and it will appear again tomorrow.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Equality
To fill the hour -- that is happiness.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Happiness
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Friends and Friendship
The glory of friendship is not in the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is in the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Friends and Friendship
A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Friends and Friendship
I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and new.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Gratitude
The eye is easily frightened.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Eyes
Our faith comes in moments... yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Faith
The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Eyes
For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Freedom
Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all the management of human affairs.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Focus
A day for toil, an hour for sport, but for a friend is life too short.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Friends and Friendship
Great people are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Greatness
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Friends and Friendship
He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Greatness
I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Friends and Friendship
Be true to your own act and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant to break the monotony of a decorous age.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Honesty
The only prudence in life is concentration.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Focus
I didn t find my friends; the good Lord gave them to me.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Friends and Friendship
Envy is the tax which all distinction must pay.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Envy
Coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Energy
Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Heart
Every man passes his life in the search after friendship.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Friends and Friendship
All that I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Faith
Earth laughs in flowers.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Flowers
Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Fortune
If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Facts
Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other; given the upper, to find the under side.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Facts
There is always a best way of doing everything.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Excellence
Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman -- repose in energy.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Gentlemen
The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Example
The course of everything goes to teach us faith.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Faith
Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Facts
The first farmer was the first man. All historic nobility rests on the possession and use of land.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Farming and Farmers
All mankind loves a lover.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Love
Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Fear
Fear always springs from ignorance.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Fear
A man s personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Faults
Do the thing we fear, and the death of fear is certain.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Fear
Always do what you are afraid to do.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Fear
There is no one who does not exaggerate!
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Exaggeration
The less government we have the better.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Government
Our expenses are all for conformity.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Individuality
I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Extra Mile
In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Learning
The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Love
Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign is cheerfulness -- an open and noble temper.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Health
We estimate the wisdom of nations by seeing what they did with their surplus capital.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Finance
Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Food and Eating
We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Learning
The years teach us much the days never knew.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Learning
The studious class are their own victims: they are thin and pale, their feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the day a fear of interruption --pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Learning
No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Facts
No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Learning
Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Exaggeration
Them meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Good and Evil
Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Love
Flowers are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty out-values all the utilities of the world.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Flowers
The only gift is a portion of thyself.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Gifts
It is very hard to be simple enough to be good.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Goodness
The faith that stands on authority is not faith.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Faith
Every man is an impossibility until he is born.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Impossibility
He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Love
The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Familiarity
A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Individuality
Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Health
The dice of God are always loaded.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
God
Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Genius
The greatest genius is the most indebted person.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Genius
The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Genius
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men -- that is genius.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Genius
When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Genius
So far as a person thinks; they are free.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Freedom
Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Freedom
There is a crack in everything God has made.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
God
It is always so pleasant to be generous, though very vexatious to pay debts.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Generosity
Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Goals
I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Happiness
Happiness is a perfume which you cannot pour on someone without getting some on yourself.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Happiness
Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Experience
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Genius
The more experiments you make the better.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Experience
Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Genius
Accept your genius and say what you think.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Genius
A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Genius
I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Knowledge
Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Passion
Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Marriage
The betrothed and accepted lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden by her acceptance. She was heaven while he pursued her, but she cannot be heaven if she stoops to one such as he!
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Marriage
You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Kindness
Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Inheritance
By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Machinery
Self-sacrifice is the real miracle out of which all the reported miracles grow.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Self-sacrifice
The creation of a thousand forest in one acorn.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Power
Everything intercepts us from ourselves.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Intervention
Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Power
The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Life and Living
That man is idle who can do something better.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Idleness
Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Light
Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Intelligence and Intellectuals
Our chief want in life is somebody who will make us do what we can.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Leaders and Leadership
The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Power
Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Life and Living
I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Language
A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Intelligence and Intellectuals
If a man s eye is on the Eternal, his intellect will grow.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Intelligence and Intellectuals
Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Manners
Manners are the happy way of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love --now repeated and hardened into usage. They form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dewdrops which give such depth to the morning meadows.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Manners
Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Manners
The basis of good manners is self-reliance.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Manners
If we live truly, we shall see truly.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Life and Living
Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Knowledge
There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Manners
Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Lies and Lying
Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Life and Living
Life too near paralyses art.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Life and Living
The masses have no habit of self reliance or original action.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Masses
Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Life and Living
Live, let live, and help live
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Life and Living
A good indignation brings out all one s powers.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Power
Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Power
Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Life and Living
It is not length of life, but depth of life.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Life and Living
A few strong instincts and a few plain rules suffice us.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Instinct
The measure of a great leader, is their success in bringing everyone around to their opinion twenty years later.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Leaders and Leadership
The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Martyrdom
Wherever there is power there is age.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Power
What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Power
There is no knowledge that is not power.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Power
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Humankind
The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Martyrdom
Language is the archives of history.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Language
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Integrity
The first thing a great person does, is make us realize the insignificance of circumstance.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Leaders and Leadership
In failing circumstances no one can be relied on to keep their integrity.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Integrity
If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Intuition
An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Institutions
Knowledge is the only elegance.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Knowledge
Knowledge comes by eyes always open and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Knowledge
At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Hypocrisy
If you shoot at a king you must kill him.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Kings
One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Intelligence and Intellectuals
Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Men and Women
There is this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means; draw it all out, and hold him to it.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Humor
The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Inspiration
What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Imagination
We are prisoners of ideas.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Ideas
Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Masses
People do not deserve to have good writings; they are so pleased with the bad.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Literature
The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Imagination
Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Self-respect
We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Leaders and Leadership
This gives force to the strong -- that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Self-reliance
The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Self-reliance
When I was praised I lost my time, for instantly I turned around to look at the work I had thought slightly of, and that day I made nothing new.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Praise
We live by our imagination, our admiration s, and our sentiments.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Imagination
Some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Praise
Imitation is suicide.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Imitation
A man s library is a sort of harem.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Libraries
Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, What it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Libraries
Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the book-worm.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Libraries
Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Loneliness
Good men must not obey the laws too well.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Law and Lawyers
I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that 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. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Travel and Tourism
No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Self-reliance
Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Self-reliance
Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of