Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes

If men would avoid that general language and general manner in which they strive to hide all that is peculiar, and would say only what was uppermost in their own minds, after their own individual manner, every man would be interesting.

To the dull mind all nature is leaden.  To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence.

Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.

Every individual strives to grow and exclude and to exclude and grow, to the extremities of the universe, and to impose the law of its being on every other creature.

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.

The imagination and the senses cannot be gratified at the same time.

We wake from one dream into another dream.

The first wealth is health.

Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover.

When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will.  His class is extinguished with him.  In some other and quite different field, the next man will appear.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Let him be great, and love shall follow him.

Goodness that preaches undoes itself.

Every actual State is corrupt.  Good men must not obey the laws too well.

The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

The difference between Talent and Genius is, that Talent says things which he has never heard but once, and Genius things which he has never heard.

The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is.

Genius seems to consist merely in trueness of sight, in using such words as show that the man was an eye-witness, and not a repeater of what was told.

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

If a man carefully examine his thoughts he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future.  His well-being is always ahead.  Such a creature is probably immortal.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

It is one of the blessing of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

Though we love goodness and not stealing, yet also we love freedom and not preaching.

We love flattery, even though we are no deceived by it, because it shows that we are of importance enough to be courted.

The love of novels is the preference of sentiment to the senses.

Fear is an instructor of great sagacity and the herald of all revolutions.

A man must thank his defects, and stand in some terror of his talents.

In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.

Whatever limits us, we call Fate.

There is no strong performance without a little fanaticism in the performer.

If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.

A man finds room in the few square inches of his face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.

The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.

Experience is the only teacher, and we get his lesson indifferently in any school.

As long as any man exists, there is some need of him; let him fight for his own.

Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better.

The efforts which we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so.

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 colleges and school are not an education, but the means of education.

Meek young men grow up in colleges and believe it is their duty to accept the views which books have given, and grow up slaves.

You will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.

Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.

Let not a man guard his dignity, but let his dignity guard him.

We are always getting ready to live, but never living.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.

Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day.

A cultivated man, wise to know and bold to perform, is the end to which nature works.

A cheerful, intelligent face is the end of culture.

No man can be criticised but by a greater than he.  Do not, then, read the reviews.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring, a south wind, not an east wind.

Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.  There is no such thing as concealment.

No man gains credit for his cowardly courtesies.

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.

Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

The best of life is conversation, and the greatest success is confidence, or perfect understanding between sincere people.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

All conservatives are such from personal defects.  They have been effeminated by position or nature…and can only , like invalids, act on the defensive.

The god of Victory is said to be one-handed, but Peace gives victory to both sides.

The great majority of men grow up and grow old in seeming and following.

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good.

When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practised man relies on the language of the first.

Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

Common sense is as rare as genius.

People who wash much have a high mind about it, and talk down to those who wash little.

The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops–no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State.

Cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment, I could never stay there five minutes.

By the irresistible maturing of the general mind, the Christian traditions have lost their hold.

As a man thineth so is he, and as a man chooseth so is he.

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

Nature magically suits the man to his fortunes, by making these the fruit of his character.

The secret of the world is the tie between person and event.  Person makes event and event person.

Shallow men believe in luck…Strong men believe in cause and effect.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves.  Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

Books take their place according to their specific gravity as surely as potatoes in a tub.

A beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts.

The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings.

We fly to Beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.

If eyes were made for seeing,/ Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.

Beauty without expression tires.

Any extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm.

Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it.

The aid we can give each other is only incidental, lateral, and sympathetic.

Every man believes that he has a greater possibility.

Picture and sculpture are the celebrations and festivities of form.

It depends little on the object, much on the mood, in art.

Always scorn appearances and you always may.

The Yankee is one who, if he once gets his teeth set on a thing, all creation can’t make him let go.

Everything intercepts us from ourselves.

The affections cannot keep their youth anymore than men.

Every calamity is a spur and a valuable hint.

Every advantage has its tax.

The most active lives have so much routine as to preclude progress almost equally with the most inactive.

People who know how to act are never preachers.

Begin and proceed on a settled and not-to-be-shaken conviction that but little is permitted to any man to do or to know and if he complies with the first grand laws, he shall do well.

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man.

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.