- Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

Language is fossil Poetry.

We change whether we like it or not.

The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.

Give me insight into today and you may have the antique and future worlds.

Be an opener of doors

Self trust is the essence of heroism.

Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, of the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board.

The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by redemption of the soul.

Mankind divides itself into two classes,--benefactors and malefactors. The second class is vast; the first a handful.

It is an esoteric doctrine of society, that a little wickedness is good to make muscle; as if conscience were not good for hands and legs.

I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.

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

The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded.

When there is no vision, people perish.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.

We boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is through a transfer of idolatry.

We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities.

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

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.

He has not learned the first lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.

Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.

When it's dark enough men see stars.

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

It does not hurt weak eyes to look into beautiful eyes never so long.

Flowers are the earth laughing.

Let not a man guard his dignity, but let his dignity guard him.

Everything in our world, even a drop of dew, is a microcosm of the universe.

A man's library is a sort of harem.

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive one.

People are very inclined to set moral standards for others.

What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour?

It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

People destined to meet will do so, apparently by chance, at precisely the right moment.

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.

I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.

Thought is the seed of action.

When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; ... he learns his ignorance, is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation and real skill.

Insist on yourself. Never imitate.

The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts.

There is always safety in valor.

Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.