Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

page 4

727 Timeless Quotes Inspiring Self-Discovery, Happiness, and Life's Adventures

“The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”

“Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.”

“The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.”

“Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.”

“In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes.”

“For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.”

“People only see what they are prepared to see.”

“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”

“Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion.”

“Sorrow looks back, Worry looks around, Faith looks up”

“Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.”

“All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.”

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

“You are constantly invited to be what you are.”

“Some books leave us free and some books make us free.”

“Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.”

“You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”

“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.”

“Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.”

“Love, and you shall be loved.”

“Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.”

“None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.”

“We are always getting ready to live, but never living.”

“Beauty without expression is boring.”

“Fear always springs
from ignorance.”

“Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work but the solidest things we know.”

“Even in the mud and scum of things, something always, always sings.”

“The years teach much which the days never know.”

“The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret.”

“Be good to your work, your word, and your friend.”

“Riding a horse is not a gentle hobby, to be picked up and laid down like a game of solitaire. It is a grand passion. It seizes a person whole and once it has done so, he/she will have to accept that his life will be radically changed.”

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

“Every wall is a door.”

“What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have yet to be discovered.”

“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”

“A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.”

“For each new morning with its light,
For rest and shelter of the night,
For health and food, for love and friends,
For everything Thy goodness sends.”

“We acquire the strength we have overcome.”

“If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and adore.”

“Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.”

“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.”

“Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest.”

“There is one other reason for dressing well, namely that dogs respect it, and will not attack you in good clothes.”

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

“Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it”

“In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.”

“We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.”

“To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”

“Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”