Ralph Waldo Emerson

People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every great achievement is the victory of a flaming heart.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a tendency for things to right themselves.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Act, if you like, but you do it at your peril. 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.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The German intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of the English, and the American adventure; but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German public asks for a controlling sincerity.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with celestial air, until it eclipses the sun and moon.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The ancestor of every action is thought.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Real action is in silent moments.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are always getting ready to live, but never living.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Why should we be cowed by the name of Action?.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man's action is only a picture book of his creed.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The thirst for adventure is the vent which Destiny offers; a war, a crusade, a gold mine, a new country, speak to the imagination and offer swing and play to the confined powers.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one's own sunshine

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man is a god in ruins.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed, there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennui s, vanish, all duties even.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who also knows why will always be his boss. As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat; self-control is the rule.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We boil at different degrees.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Who can guess how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes?

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some of your grief you have cured, and lived to survive; but what torments of pain have you endured that haven't as yet arrived.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The true poem is the poet's mind.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

New arts destroy the old.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every artist was first an amateur.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The line of beauty is the line of perfect economy.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty rests on necessities.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue. Every natural action is graceful; every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

All the great ages have been ages of belief.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Religion is as effectually destroyed by bigotry as by indifference.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is properly no history; only biography.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are books which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Never read any book that is not a year old.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to it.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every man is a consumer and ought to be a producer.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call common sense; a man of a strong affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic. There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune in making money. Men talk as if there were some magic about this. He knows that all goes on the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent -- for every effect a perfect cause -- and that good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

People wish to be settled. It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Judge of your natural character by what you do in dreams.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

That which we call character is a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means. It is conceived of as a certain undemonstrable force, a familiar or genius, by whose impulses the man is guided, but whose counsels he cannot impart.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Gross and obscure natures, however decorated, seem impure shambles; but character gives splendor to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and gray hairs.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do what you know and perception is converted into character.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson