A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
As we grow old…the beauty steals inward.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Character is higher than intellect... A great soul will be strong to live, as well as to think.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Children are all foreigners.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the triumph of some enthusiasm.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every hero becomes a bore at last.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Give all to love; obey thy heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
God enters by a private door into every individual.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the Stern Fact, the Sad Self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Insist on yourself; never imitate... Every great man is unique.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let not a man guard his dignity, but let his dignity guard him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air…
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
That which we persist in doing becomes easier, not that the task itself has become easier, but that our ability to perform it has improved.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The ancestor of every action is a thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended halfness; a non performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, is comedy and it announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call laughter.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only gift is a portion of thyself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatest, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world belongs to the energetic.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge, and fox, and squirrel.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tis the good reader that makes the good book.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We all boil at different degrees.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We do what we must, and call it by the best names.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When you strike at a king, you must kill him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
?Whoever is open, loyal, true; of humane and affable demeanour; honourable himself, and in his judgement of others; faithful to his word as to law, and faithful alike to God and man....such a man is a true gentleman.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hitch your wagon to a star.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "American Civilization", The Atlantic Monthly, 1862
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self Reliance"
Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance", 1841
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 'Art,' 1841
Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 'Journals,' 1836
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; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, (attributed)
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, (attributed)
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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Address on The Method of Nature, 1841
To be great is to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, An Essay on Self-Reliance
Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, First Series: Prudence, 1841
Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal (May 1849)
When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1824
The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence.
alph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1839
Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims (Quotation and Originality)
Every artist was first an amateur.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims: Progress of Culture, 1876
In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims: Quotation and Originality, 1876
Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims: The Comic, 1876
The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Natural History of Intellect (1893)
Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, New England Reformers, 1844
In every work of genius we see our own rejected thoughts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
As soon as there is life there is danger.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude (1870)
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, Society and Solitude: Works and Days, 1870
The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life, 'Fate,' 1860
