Ralph Waldo Emerson

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The masses have no habit of self reliance or original action.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men are what their mothers made them.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

My chief want in life is someone who shall make me do what I can.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is through a transfer of idolatry.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We cannot see things that stare us in the face until the hour comes that the mind is ripened.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Shall we judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its actions are insane like its whole constitution. It persecutes a principle; it would whip a right; it would tar and feather justice, by inflicting fire and outrage upon the houses and persons of those who have these. It resembles the prank of boys, who run with fire-engines to put out the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The world is his who has money to go over it.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Money often costs too much.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Money is the representative of a certain quantity of corn or other commodity. It is so much warmth, so much bread.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune, and when you have it, it requires ten times as much skill to keep it.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Music causes us to think eloquently.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I find that the Americans have no passions, they have appetites.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man is related to all nature.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of hidden stuff.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

In nature nothing can be given. All things are sold.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature... She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Make yourself necessary to somebody.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Necessity does everything well.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We do what we must, and call it by the best names.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

No orator can top the one who can give good nicknames.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The reason why men do not obey us is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's opinions. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only sin that we never forgive in each other is a difference in opinion.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Be an opener of doors.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting -- a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap, than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every wall is a door.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Adopt the pace of nature; her secret is patience.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself; nothing, but the triumph of principles.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The people are to be taken in small doses.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the rest.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it. you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little, you gain the great.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

That which we do not believe, we cannot adequately say; even though we may repeat the words ever so often.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Genius Borrows nobly.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whenever you are sincerely pleased you are nourished.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Only poetry inspires poetry.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply, the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some men are born to own, and can animate all their possessions. Others cannot: their owning is not graceful; seems to be a compromise of their character: they seem to steal their own dividends.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We have more than we use.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The power which resides in man is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every man believes that he has greater possibilities.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Oh man! There is no planet sun or star could hold you, if you but knew what you are.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poverty consist in feeling poor.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The greatest man in history was the poorest.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The creation of a thousand forest in one acorn.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wherever there is power there is age.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no knowledge that is not power.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I was praised I lost my time, for instantly I turned around to look at the work I had thought slightly of, and that day I made nothing new.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Preaching is the expression of moral sentiments applied to the duties of life.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The good rain, like a bad preacher, does not know when to leave off.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Today is a king in disguise.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Give me insight into today and you may have the antique and future worlds.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The walking of Man is falling forwards.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

All promise outruns performance.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson