- Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Progress is the activity of today and the assurance of tomorrow

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, while he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.

Everything intercepts us from ourselves.

Astronomy taught us our insignificance in Nature.

Every man is an infinitely repelling orb, and holds his individual being on that condition.

Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go.

Let the bird sing without deciphering the song.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.

Money often costs too much.

The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.

For each new morning with its light, For rest and shelter of the night, For health and food, for love and friends, For everything Thy goodness sends.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

Come out of the azure. Love the day. Do not leave the sky out of your landscape.

The days come and go but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same fields, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.

Postpone not your life.

Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee.

The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.

The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

Thoughts rule the world.

Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign is cheerfulness, - an open and noble temper.

The the illuminated mind the whole world sparkles with light.

If you want to be great and successful, choose people who are great and successful and walk side by side with them.

A little integrity is better than any career.

What is the hardest task in the world? To think.

Knowledge is when you learn something new every day. Wisdom is when you let something go every day.

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees.

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.

Life is our dictionary.

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.

Calmness is always Godlike.

What I need is someone who will make me do what I can.

We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend, so we buy ice cream.

As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions.

Sorrow makes us all children again - destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest know nothing.

Happy is the house that shelters a friend.

Genius seems to consistent merely in trueness of sight.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing.

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.