Ralph Waldo Emerson > Quotes

“Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“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, Nature

“Books are for nothing but to inspire”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“As we grow old...the beauty steals inward.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages... In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
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

“Nature and books belong to all who see them.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“There are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Love what is simple and beautiful.
These are the essentials.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Tao of Emerson the Tao of Emerson

“Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, First Series

“If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being.”
― 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, Self-Reliance and Other Essays

“To a dull mind all of nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I wish to say what I think and feel today, with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Give me wine to wash me clean of the weather-stains of cares”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Patience and fortitude conquer all things.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature and Selected Essays

“People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Nothing can work damage to me except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me and never am a real sufferer except by my own fault.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude

“Wise men put their trust in ideas and not in circumstances.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of everyone of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“Common sense is as rare as genius.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Teach that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed, but our power to do so is increased.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson