- Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.

It is not the length of life, but the depth.

Imitation is suicide.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Make the most of yourself....for that is all there is of you.

Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

You become what you think about all day long.

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

Life consists of what man is thinking about all day.

The reward of a thing well done is having done it.

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.

If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and adore.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it--else it is none.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment.

If the single man plants himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abides, this huge world will come around to him.

Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest.

Quotation confesses inferiority.

Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.

Poetry must be as new as foam, and as old as the rock.

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.

Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds. Men live the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which they never enter, and with their hands on the door-latch they die outside.

People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad.

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong

A world in the hand is worth two in the bush.

A mind might ponder its thought for ages, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach it in a day.

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.

The years teach much the days never know.

Your goodness must have some edge to it -- else it is none.

There are books which take rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

Spiritual force is stronger than material force thoughts rule the world.

Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.

Fear always springsfrom ignorance.

When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest things we can know.

Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work but the solidest things we know.

An Eastern poet, Ali Ben Abu Taleb, writes with sad truth, —"He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.

To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not?

Your actions speak so loudly, I cannot hear what you are saying.

Beauty will not come at the call of the legislature.... It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.

Never miss an opportunity of noticing anything of beauty ...

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whisper of God.

The student is to read history actively not passively.

People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.

She shows us only surfaces but Nature is a million fathoms deep.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same