Search This Blog

Ralph Waldo Emerson



  • Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.



  • In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.



  • Beauty without expression tires.



  • Whatever you do, you need courage...To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage which a soldier needs.



  • Every man is a consumer and ought to be a producer.



  • When the man is at home, his standing in society is well known and quietly taken; but when he is abroad, it is problematical, and is dependent on the success of his manners.



  • The soul contains the event that shall befall it, for the event is only the actualization of its thoughts, and what we pray to ourselves for is always granted.



  • Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.



  • Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function.



  • Shallow men believe in luck, wise and strong men in cause and effect.



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



  • All diseases run into one, old age.



  • It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him.



  • There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for then we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.



  • Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command.



  • Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right.



  • All mankind love a lover.



  • Every man passes his life in the search after friendship.



  • Five great enemies to peace inhabit us: avarice, ambition, envy, anger and pride. If those enemies were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.



  • People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.



  • A man in debt is so far a slave.



  • No man can have society upon his own terms.



  • Poetry must be as new as form, and as old as the rock.



  • It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.



  • No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits, otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby - so helpless and ridiculous.



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



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



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



  • The first wealth is health.



  • With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.



  • Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.



  • Happiness is a perfume which you cannot pour on someone without getting some on yourself.



  • Fear always springs from ignorance.



  • 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.



  • Courage consists of the power of self - recovery.



  • There is a crack in everything God has made.



  • The present is an edifice which God cannot rebuild.



  • A woman's strength is the irresistible might of weakness.



  • This time, like all times, is a very good one if we but know what to do with it.



  • Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.



  • In nature, nothing can be given, all things are sold.



  • The only gift is a portion of thyself.



  • We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.



  • To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - that is genius.



  • Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.



  • Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint.



  • It is time to be old, To take in sail.



  • The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.



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



  • Nature is saturated with deity.



  • I wish to say what I think and feel today, with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.



  • The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.



  • No great man ever complain of want of opportunity.



  • For everything you have missed, you have gained something else.



  • Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate.



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



  • 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 in the best property of all - friends.



  • A good indignation brings out all one's powers.



  • Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestions, the raw material of possible poems and histories.



  • Earth laughs in flowers.



  • The whole of what we know is a system of compensations. Each suffering is rewarded; each sacrifice is made up; every debt is paid.



  • As a man thinketh, so is he, and as a man chooseth, so is he.



  • God enters by a private door into every individual.



  • Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.



  • No sensible person ever made an apology.



  • Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.



  • Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.



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



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



  • The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.



  • What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.



  • Great men are they who see that the spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.



  • Our greatest glory consists not in never falling. but in rising every time we fall.



  • Difficulties exist to be surmounted.



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



  • His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.



  • Work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance.



  • We can see well into the past; we can guess shrewdly in to the future; but that which is rolled up and muffled in impenetrable folds is today.



  • Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experience.



  • If you shoot at a king you must kill him.



  • Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.



  • A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best.



  • Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.



  • Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some fear impossible to any other.



  • A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.



  • Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? pay every debt as if God wrote the bill!



  • Skill to do comes of doing.



  • A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.



  • Self - trust is the first secret of success.



  • The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.



  • The condition which high friendship demands is the ability to do without it.



  • A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.



  • Discontent is want of self - reliance; it is infirmity of will.



  • The peace of the man who has foresworn the use of the bullet seems to me not quite peace, but a canting impotence.



  • Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.



  • To be is to with God.



  • A man is a method, a progressive arrangement;a selecting principle, gathering his like unto him wherever he goes. What you are comes to you.



  • I pay the School master, but 'tis the school boys that educate my son.



  • Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.



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



  • A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair the rest of his life.



  • A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles.



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



  • All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are...punished by fear.



  • Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.



  • The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.



  • Always do what you are afraid to do.



  • There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be only to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things.



  • A person seldom falls sick but the bystanders are animated with faint hope that he will die.



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



  • Live wastes itself while we are preparing to live.



  • A man is what thinks about all day long.



  • The world belongs to the energetic.



  • Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense.



  • To fill the hour, and leave no crevice...that is happiness.



  • I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.



  • The power which resides in man is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he until he has tried.



  • Culture, with us, ends in headache.



  • Make yourself necessary to somebody.



  • Vigor is contagious, and whatever makes us either think or feel strongly adds to our power and enlarges our field of action.



  • Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.



  • Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.



  • It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence whether a man be behind it or no.



  • Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.



  • For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?



  • I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well - dressed given a feeling of inward tranquility, which religion is powerless to bestow.



  • Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?



  • Outside, among your fellows, among strangers, you must preserve appearances, 100 things you cannot do; but inside, the terrible freedom!



  • The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.



  • People only see what they are prepared to see.



  • How casually and unobservedly we make all our most valued acquaintances.



  • Take egotism out, and you would castrate the benefactor.



  • Nature is what you may do. There is much you may not do.



  • I can find my biography in every fable that I read.



  • A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.



  • What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matter compared to what lies within us.



  • The high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man, is to be born with a bias to some pursuit which finds him in employment and happiness.



  • A feeble man can see the farms that are fenced and tilled, the houses that are built. The strong man sees the possible houses and farms. His eye makes estates as fast as the sun breeds clouds.



  • Pain, indolence, sterility, endless ennui have also their lesson for you.



  • If a man carefully examines his thoughts he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future. His well - being is always ahead.



  • Tis the good reader that makes the good book.



  • Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character.



  • All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.



  • We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its ends.



  • The merit claimed for the Anglican Church is that, if you let it alone, it will let you alone.



  • A wise man always throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interests than it is theirs to find his weak point.



  • Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the omnipresent God bursts through everywhere.



  • Play out the game, act well your part,and if the gods have blundered, we will not.



  • To believe in luck ...is skepticism.



  • Nature is reckless of the individual. When she has points to carry, she carries them.



  • Sanity is very rare; every man almost, and every woman, has a dash of madness.



  • When I first open my eyes upon the morning meadows and look out upon the beautiful world, I thank God I am alive.



  • All history is but the lengthened shadow of a great man.



  • A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts.



  • The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings.



  • The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion 20 years later.



  • Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.



  • Give all to love; obey the heart.



No comments:

Post a Comment