Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do not tell me of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

So of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more it remains.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There never was a child so lovely, but his mother was glad to get him asleep.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a gingerbread dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame, by all these attitudes and exertions --an end of the first importance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The city is recruited from the country.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sunday is the core of our civilization, dedicated to thought and reverence.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Civilization depends on morality.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing astonishes people so much as common sense and plain dealing.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace, and not pollute the morning.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves...

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are the prisoners of ideas.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

One lesson we learn early, that in spite of seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are disappointed and angry if we find that we are premature, and that their watches are slower than ours. In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

All successful men have agreed in one thing,--they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused, when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing external to you has any power over you.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Things said for conversation are chalk eggs. Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for competitors.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Courage charms us, because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Courage consists in equality to the problem before us.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

What a new face courage puts on everything!

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Half a man's wisdom goes with his courage.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is short, but there is always time for courtesy.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Courtesy Life be not so short but that there is always time for courtesy.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

That which builds is better than that which is built.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of the pleasure that concealed it.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Blame is safer than praise.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Culture is one thing and varnish is another.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Curses always recoil on the head of him who imprecates them. If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Don't be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don't bewail and moan. Omit the negative propositions. Challenge us with incessant affirmatives. Don't waste yourself in rejection, or bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

One ought never to turn one's back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

As soon as there is life there is danger.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The most dangerous thing is illusion.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The ship of heaven guides itself and will not accept a wooden rudder.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is nothing capricious in nature and the implanting of a desire indicates that its gratification is in the constitution of the creature that feel it.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; for causes which are unpenetrated.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Can anybody remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Self-command is the main discipline.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

If a man knew anything, he would sit in a corner and be modest; but he is such an ignorant peacock, that he goes bustling up and down, and hits on extraordinary discoveries.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

All diseases run into one. Old age.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are three wants which never can be satisfied: that of the rich, who wants something more; that of the sick, who wants something different; and that of the traveler, who says, Anywhere but here.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do that which is assigned to you and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I pay the schoolmaster, but it is the school boys who educate my son.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The secret in education lies in respecting the student.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly-full of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The pest of society are the egotist, they are dull and bright, sacred and profane, course and fine. It is a disease that like the flu falls on all constitutions.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The eloquent man is he who is no eloquent speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

An empire is an immense egotism.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is due to the triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson