Ralph Waldo Emerson citations

Page 8

“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.”

“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.”

“Don't be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams.”

“I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.”

“What I need is someone who will make me do what I can.”

“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.”

“Beware what you set your heart upon. For it surely shall be yours.”

“Trust instinct to the end, even though you can give no reason.”

“the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

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

“Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.”

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

“The Artist always has the masters in his eyes.”

“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.”

“The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.”

“Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.”

“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.”

“It is a happy talent to know how to play.”

“Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.”

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

“Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.”

“The ancestor of every action is a thought.”

“The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.”

“He is great who is what he is from Nature, and who never reminds us of others.”

“I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.”

“Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.”

“Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.”