Famous Quotes By Ralph Waldo Emerson

About Ralph Waldo Emerson -

Lived:	May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882
Known To Be:	American essayist, Lecturer, Poet, Philosopher
Wiki Link:	Ralph Waldo Emerson
Notable Ideas:	Self-reliance, Over-soul, Individualism, mysticism

Famous Quotes By Ralph Waldo Emerson

Quotes By Ralph Waldo Emerson -

1. A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.
2. A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
3. A good indignation brings out all one's powers.
4. A great man is always willing to be little.
5. A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.
6. A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.
7. A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles.
8. A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.
9. Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
10. All diseases run into one, old age.
11. All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.
12. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
13. All mankind love a lover.
14. As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.
15. As soon as there is life there is danger.
16. As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.
17. Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.
18. Beauty is an outward gift, which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.
19. Beauty without expression is boring.
20. Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.
21. Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.
22. Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.
23. Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.
24. Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.
25. Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
26. Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.
27. Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.
28. Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.
29. Each age, it is found, must write its own books or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.
30. Earth laughs in flowers.
31. Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.
32. Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.
33. Every artist was first an amateur.
34. Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.
35. Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.
36. Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.
37. Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.
38. Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
39. Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
40. Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.
41. For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.
42. Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.
43. Genius always finds itself a century too early.
44. God enters by a private door into every individual.
45. God screens us evermore from premature ideas.
46. Good men must not obey the laws too well.
47. Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
48. Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.
49. Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force - that thoughts rule the world.
50. Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.
51. He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.
52. I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.
53. I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.
54. In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.
55. In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.
56. In the morning a man walks with his whole body in the evening, only with his legs.
57. It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.
58. It is not length of life, but depth of life.
59. It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.
60. It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
61. Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.
62. Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.
63. Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.
64. Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.
65. Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.
66. Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.
67. Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.
68. Men are what their mothers made them.
69. Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.
70. Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.
71. Money often costs too much.
72. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
73. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
74. Nature hates calculators.
75. Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
76. No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.
77. No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.
78. No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.
79. Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.
80. Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
81. Nothing external to you has any power over you.
82. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
83. Our best thoughts come from others.
84. Our faith comes in moments our vice is habitual.
85. Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.
86. Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
87. People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.
88. People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.
89. Pictures must not be too picturesque.
90. Power and speed be hands and feet.
91. Science does not know its debt to imagination.
92. Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
93. Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.
94. The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.
95. The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.
96. The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.
97. The faith that stands on authority is not faith.
98. The first wealth is health.
99. The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.
100. The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
101. The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.
102. The highest revelation is that God is in every man.
103. The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
104. The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?
105. The only way to have a friend is to be one.
106. The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.
107. The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.
108. The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.
109. The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.
110. The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.
111. The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.
112. The years teach much which the days never know.
113. There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.
114. There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.
115. This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
116. Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
117. To be great is to be misunderstood.
118. To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
119. Trust men and they will be true to you treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.
120. Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
121. Truth is beautiful, without doubt but so are lies.
122. Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.
123. Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.
124. We acquire the strength we have overcome.
125. We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.
126. We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more.
127. We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
128. We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
129. We see God face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature.
130. What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.
131. When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.
132. Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.
133. Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.
134. Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.
135. With the past, I have nothing to do nor with the future. I live now.
136. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.