Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The Artist always has the masters in his eyes.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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 serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

~ 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

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

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sorrow looks back, Worry looks around, Faith looks up

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Imitation is suicide.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

You become what you think about all day long.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Envy is ignorance, Imitation is Suicide.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

~ 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

If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and adore.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is one other reason for dressing well, namely that dogs respect it, and will not attack you in good clothes.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this, the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong is what is against it.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Napoleon said of Massena, that he was not himself until the battle began to go against him; then, when the dead began to fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination, and he put on terror and victory as a robe. So it is in rugged crises, in unweariable endurance, and in aims which put sympathy out of question, that the angel is shown.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The life of truth is cold.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man,When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' The youth whispers, 'I can.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say,—'Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson