Quotes by Ralph Emerson

• The ancestor of every action is a thought.
• The faith that stands on authority is not faith.
• The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
• The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.
• The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
• The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
• The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.
• The first wealth is health.
• The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.
• Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
• Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.
• Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
• Science does not know its debt to imagination.
• Revolutions go not backward.
• The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.
• The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.
• The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
• The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.
• The highest revelation is that God is in every man.
• The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
• Reality is a sliding door.
• The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.
• Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.
• The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?
• The only way to have a friend is to be one.
• The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.
• The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.
• The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.
• The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.
• No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.
• People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.
• Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
• Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
• Nothing external to you has any power over you.
• Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
• Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.
• No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.
• One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.
• No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.
• Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting.
• Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
• Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
• Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
• Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.
• Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
• Pictures must not be too picturesque.
• People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.
• People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else.
• People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.
• People only see what they are prepared to see.
• O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.
• The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.
• Power and speed be hands and feet.
• There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.
• Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.
• Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual.
• Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.
• Our best thoughts come from others.
• Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.
• People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.
• What you are comes to you.
• The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.
• We are always getting ready to live but never living.
• We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.
• We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.
• We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.
• We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
• We are wiser than we know.
• We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more.
• We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
• We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
• We must be our own before we can be another's.
• We see God face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature.
• What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.
• We aim above the mark to hit the mark.
• Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.
• A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him; wherever he goes.
• Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.
• You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.
• Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
• Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.
• What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.
• Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.
• What we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.
• Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?
• Who you are speaks so loudly I can't hear what you're saying.
• Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.
• When we quarrel, how we wish we had been blameless.
• When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.
• We acquire the strength we have overcome.
• With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.
• There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.
• The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.
• The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.
• The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
• The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.
• The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.
• The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.
• The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.
• The years teach much which the days never know.
• There are other measures of self-respect for a man, than the number of clean shirts he puts on every day.
• There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.
• There is a tendency for things to right themselves.
• There is always safety in valor.
• There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.
• We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.
• To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
• Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.
• Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.
• Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.
• Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.
• Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.
• There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
• Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.
• There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.
• To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
• To be great is to be misunderstood.
• Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
• This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
• There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.
• The reward of a thing well done is having done it.
• Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
• Earth laughs in flowers.
• Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.
• Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
• Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?
• Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.
• Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.
• Children are all foreigners.
• Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.
• Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.
• Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.
• Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
• Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.
• Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.
• Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.
• Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.
• Beauty is an outward gift, which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.
• Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.
• Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.
• Every artist was first an amateur.
• Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
• Every burned book enlightens the world.
• Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail.
• Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.
• Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.
• Every man I meet is in some way my superior.
• Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.
• Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.
• Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
• Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.
• Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.
• Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
• Money often costs too much.
• A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts.
• A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
• A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
• A good indignation brings out all one's powers.
• A great man is always willing to be little.
• A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.
• A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.
• A man in debt is so far a slave.
• A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.
• A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.
• A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.
• A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles.
• Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.
• America is another name for opportunity.
• Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.
• Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.
• As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.
• As soon as there is life there is danger.
• As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.
• A man is what he thinks about all day long.
• An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.
• A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.
• Always do what you are afraid to do.
• All mankind love a lover.
• All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
• All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.
• All diseases run into one, old age.
• Beauty without expression is boring.
• As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.
• It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 'always do what you are afraid to do.'
• I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.
• If a man can... make a better mousetrap, the world will make a beaten path to his door.
• If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.
• If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.
• Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.
• In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.
• Every hero becomes a bore at last.
• In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.
• In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.
• It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.
• It is my desire, in the office of a Christian minister, to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart. Having said this, I have said all.
• It is not length of life, but depth of life.
• It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
• I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.
• Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.
• Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.
• Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.
• Men are what their mothers made them.
• Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.
• Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.
• It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.
• Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.
• It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.
• Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.
• Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.
• Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.
• Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.
• Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.
• If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.
• Make yourself necessary to somebody.
• Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.
• Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.
• Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.
• Every wall is a door.
• Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.
• Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.
• Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
• In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.
• Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
• I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.
• Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.
• For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.
• For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.
• For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.
• Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.
• Hitch your wagon to a star.
• Genius always finds itself a century too early.
• He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.
• Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.
• Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.
• Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force - that thoughts rule the world.
• Getting old is a fascination thing. The older you get, the older you want to get.
• Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
• Good men must not obey the laws too well.
• God screens us evermore from premature ideas.
• God enters by a private door into every individual.
• Give a boy address and accomplishments and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes.
• Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.
• Do not follow where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
• What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.
• Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
• What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
• Greatness is not found in possessions, but in purpose.
• Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail
• Do not go where the path may lead, go instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.