Waldo Emerson Quotes

Nature is what you may do. There is much you may not do.

The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.

Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.

Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.

Character is that which can do without success.

The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.

Skill to do comes of doing.

Difficulties exist to be surmounted.

Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.

I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever only rejoices me, and the heart appoints

though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

No sensible person ever made an apology.

All mankind love a lover.

All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are ... punished by fear.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate.

Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.

Only by obedience to his genius; only by the freest activity in the way constitutional to him, does an angel seem to arise beforea man, and lead him by the hand out of all the wards of the prison.

We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken.

And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.

Treat your friend as a spectacle.

Natural religion supplies still all the facts which are disguised under the dogma of popular creeds. The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals.

'Tis a good rule in every journey to provide some piece of liberal study to rescue the hours which bad weather, bad company, and taverns steal from the best economist.

The Oversoul is before Time, and Time, Father of all else, is one of his children.

Great thoughts ensure musical expression.

Religion must always be a crab fruit; it cannot be grafted, and keep its wild beauty.

There is nothing in history to parallel the influence of Jesus Christ.

The victories of character are instant, and victories for all.

The world is his who has money to go over it.

Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread.

All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do.... Build, therefore, your own world.

To a physician, each man, each woman, is an amplification of one organ.

She shows us only surfaces, but she is million-fathoms deep.

What goes on around you... compares little with what goes on inside you.

It is defeat which educates us.

Preaching is the expression of moral sentiments applied to the duties of life.

We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument, to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone.

I have heard that death takes us away from ill things, not from good. I have heard that when we pronounce the name of man we pronounce the belief of immortality.

He that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves

War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man.

The masses have no habit of self-reliance or original action.

Faith makes us, and not we it; and faith makes its own forms.

The Americans have no faith, they rely on the power of a dollar; they are deaf to sentiment.

We live in a system of approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary; a round and final success nowhere. We are encamped in nature, not domesticated.

Where there is no vision a people perish.

Continual failure is a road to success - if you have the strength to go on.

Vivacity, leadership, must be had, and we are not allowed to be nice in choosing. We must fetch the pump with dirty water, if clean cannot be had.