- Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Never read a book that is not a year old.

Wit makes its own welcome and levels all distinctions.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion 20 years later.

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

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.

Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes by making them the fruit of his character.

Play out the game act well your part and if the gods have blundered we will not.

Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint.

People wish to be settled only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

Pain indolence sterility endless ennui have also their lesson for you.

It is time to be old To take in sail.

America is a country of young men.

The flowering of geometry.

When we quarrel how we wish we had been blameless.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.

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

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple which has no superfluous parts which exactly answers its ends.

Some thoughts always find us young and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.

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

Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it no excess of explanation and it is full of suggestions the raw material of possible poems and histories.

We look wishfully to emergencies to eventful revolutionary times ... and think how easy to have taken our part when the drum was rolling and the house was burning over our heads.

The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party but they say nothing and if we do not use the gifts they bring they carry them as silently away.

Good breeding a union of kindness and independence.

Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining but they make them artificial.

A sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

If you would lift me you must be on a higher ground.

An institution is the lengthening shadow of one man.

The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.

He that rides his hobby gently must always give way to him that rides his hobby hard.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

Whatever you do you need courage. ... To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage which a soldier needs.

Do not be too timid and squeamish. ... All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Courage consists of the power of self-recovery.

Every man has his own courage and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

For what avail the plough or sail Or land or life if freedom fail?

I wish to say what I think and feel today with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.

Culture with us ends in headache.

The question is whether suicide is the way out or the way in.

Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill!

As a man thinketh so is he and as a man chooseth so is he.

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please-you can never have both.

We do not live an equal life but one of contrasts and patchwork now a little joy then a sorrow now a sin then a generous or brave action.

Adopt the pace of nature her secret is patience.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust So near is God to man. When Duty whispers low Thou must The youth replies I can.

I pay the School Master but 'tis the school boys that educate my son.

The things taught in schools are not an education but the means of an education.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance that imitation is suicide that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion.

The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education but the means of education.

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.