Famous Quotes from ...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

  • To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children...to leave the world a better place...to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Always do what you are afraid to do.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • How much of human life is lost in waiting.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life, that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived - that is to have succeeded... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • We do not live an equal life, but one of contrasts and patchwork; now a little joy, then a sorrow, now a sin, then a generous or brave action... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Life is not so short but that there is always time for courtesy... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Life is a festival only to the wise.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • As soon as there is life, there is danger... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • All life is an experiment.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experience.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours and ages that will follow it.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Who loses a day loses life... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • The pleasure of life is according to the man who lives it, and not according to the work or the place... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in, forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day, you shall begin it well and serenely...... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Only so much do I know, as I have lived... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Every man passes his life in the search after friendship.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • We are always getting ready to live, but never living... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Every man is a borrower and a mimic, life is theatrical and literature a quotation... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • 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?... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • The world is his who has money to go over it.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do; not that the nature of the thing itself is changed, but that our power to do is increased... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Society is a hospital of incurables.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the peo... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • All men in the abstract are just and good... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Give all to love; obey thy heart... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Men are respectable only as they respect... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Good bye, proud world! I'm going home; Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Men are what their mothers made them... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • The reason why all men honor love is because it looks up, and not down; aspires and not despairs... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • We feed on genius; great men exist that there might be greater men.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library: a company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries in a thousand years.... The thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Good men must not obey the laws too well.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • 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.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • 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?... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of water; in male and female; in the equation of quantity and quality; in the fluids of the animal body; in the systole an... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • We believe that the defects of so many perverse and so many frivolous people, who make up society, are organic, and society is a hospital of incurables... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • 'Tis man's perdition to be safe, When for the truth he ought to die... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • He thought it happier to be dead, to die for beauty, than live for bread... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the rest.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Strong men greet war, tempest, hard times. They wish, as Pindar said, to tread the floors of hell, with necessities as hard as iron.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • 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.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Men lose their tempers in defending their taste... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • If the stars should appear just one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore!... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Men are lenses through which we read our own minds.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: it was somebody's name, or he happened to be there at right time, or it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Slavery is an institution for converting men into monkeys.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • The reason why men do not obey us is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Never self-possessed, or prudent, love is all abandonment.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • The President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Treat a man as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he could be, and he will become what he should be.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • All mankind loves a lover.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • A good intention clothes itself with power... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of hidden stuff.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Be not the slave of your own past ... plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience, that shall explain and overlook the old.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • A good indignation brings out all one's powers.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Talent for talent's sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred; nor can I detach one duty, like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically on the payment of moneys... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • We rail at trade, but the historian of the world will see that it was the principle of liberty; that it settled America, and destroyed feudalism, and made peace and keeps peace; that it will abolish slavery.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • We love force and we care very little how it is exhibited... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • We live by our imagination, our admiration s, and our sentiments.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Some of your grief you have cured, and lived to survive; but what torments of pain have you endured that haven't as yet arrived.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • 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.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and power because it is as good as money... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • We take care of our health, we lay up money, we make our roof tight and our clothing sufficient, but who provides wisely that he shall not be wanting the best property of all -- friends?... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Born for success he seemed, With grace to win, with heart to hold, With shining gifts that took all eyes... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Can anybody remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists--talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • 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.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • When you strike at a king, you must kill him... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • A man's wife has more power over him than the state has.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • What you are comes to you... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Between eighteen and twenty, life is like an exchange where one buys stocks, not with money, but with actions. Most men buy nothing.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Women should not be expected to write, or fight, or build, or compose scores; she does all by inspiring men to do all... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • When a man meets his make, society begins.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • A nation never falls but by suicide... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • There are two classes of poets - the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • Nothing external to you has any power over you.... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}
  • We do not yet trust the unknown power of thoughts... Ralph Waldo Emerson {view}