- Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.

One can never truly savor success until first tasting adversity.

Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Man is physical as well as metaphysical, a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

What we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.

The greatest difficulty is that men do not think enough of themselves, do not consider what it is that they are sacrificing when they follow in a herd, or when they cater for their establishment.

Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners.

The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

Obedience alone gives the right to command.

Whatever limits us we call Fate.

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

In the highest civilization the book is still the highest delight.

Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nordrove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery.

Self reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

Children are all foreigners.

Stand guard at the portal of your mind.

The clergyman who lives in the city may have piety, but he must have taste.

Real action is in silent moments.

Every great achievement is the victory of a flaming heart.

Work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of chance.

Persons are fine things, but they cost so much! for thee I must pay me.

Your actions speak so loud, I can't hear what you say.

When it comes to divide an estate, the politest men quarrel.

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue.

Money is of no value; it cannot spend itself. All depends on the skill of the spender.

The writer, like a priest, must be exempted from secular labor. His work needs a frolic health; he must be at the top of his condition.

He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.

The Italians are fond of red clothes, peacock plumes, and embroidery; and I remember one rainy morning in the city of Palermo, the street was ablaze with scarlet umbrellas.

You cannot sincerely try to help another without helping yourself

Every novel is a debtor to Homer.

Fractures well cured make us more strong.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage.

Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs.

It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.

Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks he is free.

Put God in your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer the payment is with-held, the better for you; for compound interest on compound interest is the rate and usage of this exchequer.

Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed, there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennui s, vanish, all duties even.

Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?

Every man is a borrower and a mimic, life is theatrical and literature a quotation.

Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.