Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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 little better; whether be 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 the meaning of success.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

That which we are, we shall teach, not voluntarily, but involuntarily. Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The years teach us much, which the days never knew.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions. In the morning, — solitude; said Pythagoras; that Nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company, and that her favorite may make acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to serious and abstracted thought. 'Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to time as benefactors: and the wise instructor will press this point of securing to the young soul in the disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and habits of solitude.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst...They are for nothing but to inspire.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Self-trust is the first secret of success.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, -- he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

~ 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

Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope and eloquence in all whom she approaches.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore it if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

He is a dull observer whose experience has not taught him the reality and force of magic, as well as of chemistry.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Misunderstood! It is a right fool's word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Another point of economy is to look for seed of the same kind as you sow, and not to hope to buy one kind with an other kind. Friendship buys friendship; justice, justice; military merit, military success...Yet there is commonly a confusion of expectations on these points. Hotspur lives for the moment, praises himself for it, and despises Furlong, that he does not. Hotspur of course is poor, and Furlong is a good provider. The odd circumstance is that Hotspur thinks it a superiority in himself, this improvidence, which ought to be rewarded with Furlong's lands.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

That law of nature whereby everything climbs to higher platforms, and bodily vigor becomes mental and moral vigor. The bread he eats is first strength and animal spirits; it becomes, in higher laboratories, imagery and thought; and in still higher results, courage and endurance. This is the right compound interest; this is capital doubled, quadrupled, centupled; man raised to his highest power. The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritual creation and not in augmenting animal existence.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

They should own who can administer, not they who hoard and conceal; not they who, the greater proprietors they are, are only the greater beggars, but they whose work carves out work for more, opens a path for all. For he is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people are poor; and how to give all access to the masterpieces of art and nature is the problem of civilization.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and out American colleges will recede in their public importance whilst they grow richer every year.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The cramping influence of a hard formalist on a young child in repressing his spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding, and that without producing indignation, but only fear and obedience, and even much sympathy with his tyranny, - is a familiar fact explained to the child when he becomes a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of his youth is himself a child tyrannized over by those names and words and forma, of whose influence he was merely the organ to the youth.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent we have discovered afterward that much was accomplished and much was begun in us.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scanderbeg, and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue?

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A great man is always willing to be little.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claim to praise.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Only so much of life do I know as I have lived.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson