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Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful we must carry it with us or we find it not.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Oh man! There is no planet sun or star could hold you, if you but knew what you are.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hospitality: a little fire, a little food, and an immense quiet.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life; nothing is great or desirable if it is off from that.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
What forests of laurel we bring, and the tears of mankind, to those who stood firm against the opinion of their contemporaries!
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little, you gain the great.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The thirst for adventure is the vent which Destiny offers; a war, a crusade, a gold mine, a new country, speak to the imagination and offer swing and play to the confined powers.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no limit to what can be accomplished if it doesn't matter who gets the credit.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The revelation of Thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
In failing circumstances no one can be relied on to keep their integrity.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
See only that thou work and thou canst not escape the reward.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The powers of the Soul are commensurate with its needs.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom anpther's folly.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Spartans, stoics, heroes, saints and gods use short and positive speech.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do that which is assigned to you and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Courage consists in equality to the problem before us.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
We do what we can, and then make up a theory to prove our performance the best.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nations have lost their old omnipotence; the patriotic tie does not hold. Nations are getting obsolete, we go and live where we will.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
To a physician, each man, each woman, is an amplification of one organ.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is eating us up. We all shall be fables presently. Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
I look on that man as happy, who, when there is a question of success, looks into his work for a reply.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
My good hoe as it bites the ground revenges my wrongs, and I have less lust to bite my enemies. In the smoothing the rough hillocks, I smooth my temper.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is nothing capricious in nature and the implanting of a desire indicates that its gratification is in the constitution of the creature that feel it.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
That which we do not believe, we cannot adequately say; even though we may repeat the words ever so often.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Money is the representative of a certain quantity of corn or other commodity. It is so much warmth, so much bread.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done single will justify you now.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Enlarge not thy destiny, said the oracle: endeavor not to do more than is given thee in charge.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sympathy is a supporting atmosphere, and in it we unfold easily and well.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man's style is his mind's voice. Wooden minds, wooden voices.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
For what are they all in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet?
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man's action is only a picture book of his creed.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The next thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with celestial air, until it eclipses the sun and moon.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, anecdote, and all flock to their aid.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our faith comes in moments ... yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Outside, among your fellows, among strangers, you must preserve appearances, a hundred things you cannot do, but inside, the terrible freedom!
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
We can see well into the past; we can guess shrewdly into the future; but that which is rolled up and muffled in impenetrable folds is today.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man passes his life in the search after friendship.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply, the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
In private places, among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its cradle. Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal greatness.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyfull of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is methodical, and doeth her work well. Time is never to be hurried.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: it was somebody's name, or he happened to be there at right time, or it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art is a jealous mistress and if a man has a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are born believing. A man bears beliefs, as a tree bears apples.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it amused.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The whole of what we know is a system of compensations. Each suffering is rewarded; each sacrifice is made up; every debt is paid.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
In politics and in trade, bruisers and pirates are of better promise than talkers and clerks.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and rustle of the corn.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character and fortune.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is only when the mind and character slumber that dress can be seen.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our spontaneous action is always the best. You cannot, with your best deliberation and heed, come so close to any question as your spontaneous glance shall bring you.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man is a divinity in disguise, a God playing the fool.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Flowers ... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
We do what we must, and call it by the best names we can, and would fain have the praise of having intended the result which ensues.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world always had the same bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to us.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not from their vices.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
That which builds is better than that which is built.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing is great but the inexhaustible wealth of nature.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
'Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society always consists in the greatest part, of young and foolish persons.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every really able man, in whatever direction he work ... if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The miracles of genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be analyzed.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
All persons are puzzles until at last we find some word or act the key to the man, to the woman; straightaway all their past words and actions lie in light before us.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
For what avail the plough or sail Or land or life, if freedom fail?
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only gift is a portion of thyself ... the poet brings his poem; the shepherd his lamb.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Who you are is speaking so loudly that I can't hear what you're saying.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do the best we can.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.
— 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.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Go, speed the stars of Thought On to their shining goals; -- The sower scatters broad his seed, The wheat thou strew'st be souls.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force, and so do lean and beg day and night continually.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Things said for conversation are chalk eggs. Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The foundations of a person are not in matter but in spirit.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Be true to your own act and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant to break the monotony of a decorous age.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The power of a man increases steadily by continuing in one direction.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon-balls, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is a man born for but to be a reformer, a remaker of what has been made, a denouncer of lies, a restorer of truth and good?
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Can we never extract the tapeworm of Europe from the brain of our countrymen?
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The cannon will not suffer any other sound to be heard for miles and for years around it.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The truth, the hope of any time, must always be sought in minorities.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and morning star.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Friendship is an order of nobility; from its revelations we come more worthily into nature.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.
— 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
The sum of wisdom is, that the time is never lost that is devoted to work.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Manners require time, as nothing is more vulgar than haste.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field, the next man will appear.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue. Every natural action is graceful; every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
We forget ourselves and our destinies in health, and the chief use of temporary sickness is to remind us of these concerns.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The pest of society are the egotist, they are dull and bright, sacred and profane, course and fine. It is a disease that like the flu falls on all constitutions.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wisdom is to finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth; it is the beginning of wisdom.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
So of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more it remains.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
London is the epitome of our times, and the Rome of today.
— 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
The imagination and the senses cannot be gratified at the same time.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no strong performance without a little fanaticism in the performer.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to it.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The ship of heaven guides itself and will not accept a wooden rudder.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whenever you are sincerely pleased you are nourished.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade?
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Peace has its victories, but it takes a brave man to win them.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates not only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Money is of no value; it cannot spend itself. All depends on the skill of the spender.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The man who can make hard things easy is the educator.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
A woman should always challenge our respect, and never move our compassion.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Who can ... guess how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes?
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Speak the affirmative; emphasize your choice by utter ignoring of all that you reject.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great men are they who see that ... thoughts rule the world.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Get Health. No labor, effort nor exercise that can gain it must be grudged.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The eloquent man is he who is no eloquent speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
An orator or author is never successful till he has learned to make his words smaller than his ideas.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
A sect or a party is an elegant incognito, devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and new.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Washington, where an insignificant individual may trespass on a nation's time.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
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