Ralph Waldo Emerson

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Many might go to Heaven with half the labor they go to hell.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our best history is still poetry.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Be true to your own act and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant to break the monotony of a decorous age.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is 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

At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are prisoners of ideas.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man. --

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

That man is idle who can do something better.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We live by our imagination, our admiration s, and our sentiments.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Imagination is not a talent of some people but is the health of everyone.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Imitation is suicide.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Higher than the question of our duration is the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he would be a great soul in future must be a great soul now.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every man is an impossibility until he is born.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our expenses are all for conformity.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Who shall set a limit to the influence of a human being?

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The best efforts of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world alters the world.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A few strong instincts and a few plain rules suffice us.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

In failing circumstances no one can be relied on to keep their integrity.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

If a man's eye is on the Eternal, his intellect will grow.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everything intercepts us from ourselves.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you shoot at a king you must kill him.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Knowledge is the only elegance.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Knowledge comes by eyes always open and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Language is the archives of history.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The laws of each are convertible into the laws of any other.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my own constitution; the only wrong what is against it.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our chief want in life is somebody who will make us do what we can.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The measure of a great leader, is their success in bringing everyone around to their opinion twenty years later.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The first thing a great person does, is make us realize the insignificance of circumstance.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The years teach us much the days never knew.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The studious class are their own victims: they are thin and pale, their feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the day a fear of interruption --pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man's library is a sort of harem.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, What it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the book-worm.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

If we live truly, we shall see truly.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life too near paralyses art.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Live, let live, and help live

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

People do not deserve to have good writings; they are so pleased with the bad.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

All mankind loves a lover.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Shallow people believe in luck and in circumstances; Strong people believe in cause and effect.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Manners are the happy way of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love --now repeated and hardened into usage. They form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dewdrops which give such depth to the morning meadows.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The basis of good manners is self-reliance.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The betrothed and accepted lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden by her acceptance. She was heaven while he pursued her, but she cannot be heaven if she stoops to one such as he!

— Ralph Waldo Emerson