Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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

“Self trust is the essence of heroism.”

“Your goodness must have some edge to it -- else it is none.”

“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”

“Rings and jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me.”

“Imagination is a very high sort of seeing.”

“God enters by a private door into every individual.”

“A man's library is a sort of harem.”

“Nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.”

“Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.”

“We must be our own before we can be another's.”

“No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.”

“It is a luxury to be understood.”

“Speak your latent conviction… Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.”

“Some of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From evils which never arrived!”

“Happy will the house be in which the relationships are formed from character.”

“Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.”

“I covet truth; beauty is unripe childhood's cheat; I leave it behind with the games of youth.”

“I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.”

“Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.”

“But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things.”

“For nonconformity the world will whip you with its displeasure.”

“The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.”

“The student is to read history actively not passively.”

“Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.”

“We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.”

“The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance,--by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.”

“Nature hates calculators.”

“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.”

“Science does not know its debt to imagination.”

“there is no planet, sun, or star could hold you if you but knew what you are.”

“A sufficient and sure method of civilization is in the influence of good women.”

“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.”

“Let us advance on Chaos and the Dark”

“The landscape belongs to the person who looks at it…”

“There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but though his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”

“How much of human life is lost in waiting.”

“Build therefore your own world.”

“Character is that which can do without success.”

“Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.”

“Throw a stone into the stream and the ripples that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence.”

“I am the owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain,
Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain.”

“There is more in every person's soul than we think.”

“The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.”

“Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.”

“Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting—a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.”

“The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things.”

“Those who stay away from the election think that one vote will do no good. 'Tis but one step more to think one vote will do no harm.”

“Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.”

“So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can!”