- Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Genius is the power to labor better and more availably. Deserve thy genius: exalt it.

It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.

Tragedy is in the eye of the observer, and not in the heart of the sufferer.

Of all debts, men are least willing to pay their taxes; what a satire this is on government.

The chief mourner does not always attend the funeral.

Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative.

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius, the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars.

Circles, like the soul, are neverending and turn round and round without a stop.

The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.

We owe to genius always the same debt, of lifting the curtain from the common, and showing us that divinities are sitting disguised in the seeming gang of gypsies and peddlars.

If we walk in the woods, we must feed mosquitoes.

Not gold, but only man can make a people great and strong; men who, for truth and honor's sake, stand fast and suffer long.

Heaven always bears some proportion to earth. The god of the cannibal will be a cannibal, of the crusades a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.

All great successes are the triumph of persistence.

The soul is not born; it does not die; it was not produced from anyone… Unborn, eternal, it is not slain, though the body is slain.

The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.

Pines a thousand years old. Every year they must go farther for them: they recede, like beavers and Indians, before the white man.

The experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet

Freedom is not the right to live as we please, but the right to find how we ought to live in order to fulfill our potential.

The education of the will is the object of our existence.

Grow angry slowly - there's plenty of time.

Why should we fear to be crushed by savage elements, we who are made up of the same elements?

The universal soul is the alone creator of the useful and the beautiful; therefore to make anything useful or beautiful, the individual must be submitted to the universal mind.

Live in the sunshine.

Everything has its price - and if that price is not paid, not that thing but something else is obtained... it is impossible to get anything without this price.

Government exists to defend the weak and the poor and the injured party; the rich and the strong can better take care of themselves.

Fear is a great instructor.

Man's life is a progress, not a station.

You have a place to live in this world which no other man can occupy; hence no competitors.

When some external event raises your spirits and you think good days are preparing for you, do not believe it. It can never be so. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

Wherever a man commits a crime, God finds a witness. Every secret crime has its reporter.

How much we forgive to those who yield us the rare spectacle of heroic manners! We will pardon them the want of books, or arts, and even of gentler virtues. How tenaciously we remember them!

Mankind have such a deep stake in inward illumination, that there is much to be said by the hermit or monk in defence of his life of thought and prayer.

You take a weakness and start making it stronger.. You don't have to build your strengths - that you already possess... It is your weakness that needs the exercise

Isolation must precede true society.

If the race is good, so is the place.

Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

Conversation is our account of ourselves...Conversation is the vent of character as well as thoughts...It is the laboratory of the student.

It is true that the discerning intellect of the world is always much in advance of the creative, so that there are competent judges of the best book, and few writers of the best books.

I will no longer confer, differ, refer, defer, prefer, or suffer. I renounce the whole tribe of fero. I embrace absolute life.

It does not to dwell on dreams and forget to live, but it is equally foolish to ignore the past – never forget.

The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution.

Men are so charmed with valor that they have pleased themselves with being called lions, leopards, eagles and dragons, from the animals contemporary with us in the geologic formations.

In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of a man's own worthiness from other men.

The Americans have many virtues, but they have not Faith and Hope. I know no two words whose meaning is more lost sight of.

Today is a king in disguise.

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?

Any extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm.

There is ever a slight suspicion of the burlesque about earnest good men.

At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles.