- Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
This valley is the only place that comes up to the brag about it, and exceeds it.
Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.
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?
I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.
The secret of the world is the tie between person and event. Person makes event and event person.
I think no virtue goes with size;The reason of all cowardiceIs, that men are overgrown,And, to be valiant, must come downTo the titmouse dimension.
There is health in table talk and nursery play. We must wear old shoes and have aunts and cousins.
Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls.
Greatness is a property for which no man gets credit too soon; it must be possessed long before it is acknowledged.
Do not you see that every misfortune is misconduct; that every honour is desert; that every effort is an insolence of your own?...You carry your fortune in your own hand.
I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look,begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary!
We live in a system of approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary; a round and final success nowhere. We are encamped in nature, not domesticated.
He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.
Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.
A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; - read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.
There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things.
We want but two or three friends, but these we cannot do without, and they serve us in every thought we think.
Perception is a mirror not a fact. And what I look on is my state of mind, reflected outward.
The human body is a magazine of inventions, the patent office, where are the models from which every hint is taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses.
The book of nature is the book of fate. She turns the gigantic pages, leaf after leaf never returning one.
Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.
There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.
Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened.
The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed, by, as a loss of power.
God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. Always, always, always, always, always do what you are afraid to do. Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.
