Ralph Waldo Emerson: Quotes about life (page 2)

“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.”

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

“My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady.”

“Life consists of what man is thinking about all day.”

“There are books… which rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences.”

“Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.”

“In order for one to learn the important lessons of life, one must first overcome a fear each day.”

“One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your hear that every day is the best day of the year.”

“In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.”

“When I read a good book, I wish my life were three thousand years long.”

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

“One of the most beautiful compensations in life is that no person can help another without helping themselves”

“Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.”

“If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as “spiritual life,” “God,” “soul,” “cross,” etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent.”

“Tomorrow will be like today. Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live.”

“England’s genius filled all measure
Of heart and soul, of strength and pleasure,
Gave to the mind its emperor,
And life was larger than before:
Nor sequent centuries could hit
Orbit and sum of Shakespeare’s wit.
The men who lived with him became
Poets, for the air was fame.”

“The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.”

“I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.”

“Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world, — as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.”