Waldo Emerson Quotes

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

It is defeat which educates us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great thoughts ensure musical expression.

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

'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.

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.

Treat your friend as a spectacle.

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

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

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.

I find that the Americans have no passions, they have appetites.

The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting.

A man complained that on his way home to dinner he had every day to pass through that long field of his neighbor's. I advised him to buy it, and it would never seem long again.

Language is the archives of history.

When we quarrel, how we wish we had been blameless.

The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.

I do not hesitate to read. all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable-any real insight or broad human sentiment.

Do not you see that every misfortune is misconduct; that every honour is desert; that every effort is an insolence of your own?...You carry your fortune in your own hand.

No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.

Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.

Why should we be cowed by the name of Action?.

Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy.

Knowledge is the antidote to fear

All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature.

We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.

The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust.

But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's.

The day is always his, who works in it with serenity and great aims.

A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.

Though love repine, and reason chafe, There came a voice without reply,- "'Tis man's perdition to be safe, When for the truth he ought to die."

Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous or when they are most luxurious-they are conservatives after dinner.

The way to mend the bad world is to create the right world.

God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. Always, always, always, always, always do what you are afraid to do. Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.

Wise men read very sharply all of your private history in your look and gait and behavior.

Nature encourages no looseness; pardons no errors.

Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.

Perception is a mirror not a fact. And what I look on is my state of mind, reflected outward.

The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.

The borrower runs in his own debt.

Genius, even, as it is the greatest good, is he greatest harm.

There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutual respect, until, in their dialogue, each stands for the whole world.