Waldo Emerson Quotes

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

Language is fossil Poetry.

We change whether we like it or not.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

Be an opener of doors

When there is no vision, people perish.

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

Self trust is the essence of heroism.

Mankind divides itself into two classes,--benefactors and malefactors. The second class is vast; the first a handful.

Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.

The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.

Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, of the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board.

I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances.

The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by redemption of the soul.

Give me insight into today and you may have the antique and future worlds.

It is an esoteric doctrine of society, that a little wickedness is good to make muscle; as if conscience were not good for hands and legs.

We boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is through a transfer of idolatry.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.

He has not learned the first lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities.

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

When It's Darkest, Men See the Stars.

Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.

Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as two sides of an algebraic equation.

There is always safety in valor.

Everything in our world, even a drop of dew, is a microcosm of the universe.

Let not a man guard his dignity, but let his dignity guard him.

A man's library is a sort of harem.

What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour?

Flowers are the earth laughing.

As gas-light is found to be the best nocturnal police, so the universe protects itself by pitiless publicity.

I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.

There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers.

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.

It does not hurt weak eyes to look into beautiful eyes never so long.

The sea, washing the equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid, and the power and empire that follow it... ''Beware of me,'' it says, ''but if you can hold me, I am the key to all the lands.

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

Insist on yourself. Never imitate.

Activity is contagious.

Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.

Thought is the seed of action.

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

As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.