Ralph Waldo Emerson citations

Page 12

“Qu’est-ce qu’une herbe? Une plante dont les vertus n’ont pas encore été découvertes […].”

“Le premier secret du succès est la confiance en soi, la conviction que si vous êtes là, c’est que les pouvoirs de l’Univers vous y ont mis avec un motif, une tâche qui vous est strictement assignée de par votre constitution, et qu’aussi longtemps que vous y travaillerez, vous vous trouverez bien et réussirez.”

“Chaque minute que vous êtes en colère, vous perdez soixante secondes de bonheur.”

“Construisez donc votre propre monde.”

“Écrivez dans votre cœur que chaque jour est le meilleur jour de l'année.”

“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.”

“The progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface differences. To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.”

“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.”