Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“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 com 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