We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes
The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.
All diseases run into one, old age.
For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.
Pictures must not be too picturesque.
Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.
We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
The years teach much which the days never knew.
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, while he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.
Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.
It is not length of life, but depth of life.
All life is an experiment.
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
All mankind love a lover.
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?
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.
Earth laughs in flowers.
Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground.
Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
How cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew!
When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it
Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.
Science does not know its debt to imagination.
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.
Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.
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.
A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.
A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.
A fly is as untamable as a hyena.
A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
A good indignation brings out all one's powers.
A great man is always willing to be little.
A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.
A man finds room in the few square inches of his face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.
A man in debt is so far a slave.
A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles.
A man is what he thinks about all day long.
Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done somethingstrange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age.
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.
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 you first.
All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.
All our progress is an unfolding, like the 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.
All sensible people are selfish, and nature is tugging at every contract to make the terms of it fair.
Always do what you are afraid to do.
America is another name for opportunity.
An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.
Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man has a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.
As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.
As soon as there is life there is danger.
As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.
Be an opener of doors.
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.
Beauty is an outward gift, which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.
Beauty without expression is boring.
Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.
Between eighteen and twenty, life is like an exchange where one buys stocks, not with money, but with actions. Most men buy nothing.
Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.
Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?
Cards were at first for benefits designed, sent to amuse, not to enslave the mind.
Children are all foreigners.
Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.
Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.
Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.
Concentration is the secret of strengths in politics, in war, in trade, in short in all management of human affairs.
Courage consists in the power of self-recovery.
Culture is one thing and varnish is another.
Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.
Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.
Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.
Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.
Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.
Each man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well - he has changed his market-cart into a chariot of the sun.
Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.
Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding.
Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.
Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.
Every artist was first an amateur.
Every burned book enlightens the world.
Every great institution is the lengthened shadow of a single man. His character determines the character of the organization.
Every hero becomes a bore at last.
Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.
Every man has his own vocation, talent is the call.
Every man I meet is in some way my superior.
Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.
Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.
Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.
Every principle is a war-note. Whoever attempts to carry out the rule of right and love and freedom must take his life in his hand.
Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.
Everybody keeps telling me how surprised they are with what I've done. But I'm telling you honestly that it doesn't surprise me. I knew I could do it.
Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.
Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.
Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all revolutions.
Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.
Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.
Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.
Genius always finds itself a century too early.
Getting old is a fascination thing. The older you get, the older you want to get.
Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.
God enters by a private door into every individual.
God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please - you can never have both.
God screens us evermore from premature ideas.
Good men must not obey the laws too well.
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.
Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.
He builded better than he knew; the conscious stone to beauty grew.
He that can heroically endure adversity will bear prosperity with equal greatest of the soul; for the mind that cannot be dejected by the former is not likely to be transported without the latter.
He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.
Hitch your wagon to a star.
I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I'm not afraid of falling into my inkpot.
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.
I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.
I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.
If a man can... make a better mousetrap, the world will make a beaten path to his door.
If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, tho it be in the woods.
If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbor, tho' he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.
If the riches of the Indies, or the crowns of all the kingdom of Europe, were laid at my feet in exchange for my love of reading, I would spurn them all.
If the Stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.
In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.
In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.
In the vaunted works of art, the master-stroke is nature's part.
Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion, it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who, in the midst of the world, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life, that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.
It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness.
It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 'always do what you are afraid to do.'
Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.
Let every man shovel out his own snow and the whole city will be passable.
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.
Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.
Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.
Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.
Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.
Make yourself necessary to somebody.
Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.
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.
Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.
Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner.
Men are what their mothers made them.
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.
Money is the representative of a certain quantity of corn or other commodity. It is so much warmth, so much bread.
Money often costs too much.
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.
Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.
Nature hates calculators.
Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
New York is a sucked orange.
Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.
Night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree.
No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.
No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.
No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.
Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Often a certain abdication of prudence and foresight is an element of success.
One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.
Our best thoughts come from others.
Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.
Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day.
Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.
People only see what they are prepared to see.
People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else.
People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.
Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.
Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense.
Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.
Reality is a sliding door.
Remarkable trait in the American Character is the union, not very infrequent, of Yankee cleverness with spiritualism.
Revolutions go not backward.
Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.
Self-truth is the essence of heroism.
Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine, and so much in retrospect, that the amount of each person's genius is confined to a very few hours.
Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.
Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
Some men are born to own, and can animate all their possessions. Others cannot: their owning is not graceful; it seems to be a compromise of their character: they seem to steal their own dividends.
Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.
Speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon-balls and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.
The ancestor of every action is a thought.
The art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot.
The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.
The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.
The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
The finest and noblest ground on which people can live is truth; the real with the real; a ground on which nothing is assumed.
The first wealth is health.
The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.
The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him.
The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.
The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
The louder he talked of his honor the faster we counted our spoons.
The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.
The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.
The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.
The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?
The miracles of genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be analyzed.
The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature.
The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.
The reward of a thing well done is having done it.
The secret of drunkeness is, that it insulates us in thought, whilst it unites us in feeling.
The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.
The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.
The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.
The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops, but the kind of man that the country turns out.
The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservation and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made.
The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.
The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.
The whole secret of the teacher's force lies in the conviction that man are convertible.
The wise man always throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his weak point.
The wise skeptic does not teach doubt but how to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting.
The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.
The world is full of judgment-days, and into every assembly that a man enters, in every action he attempts, he is gauged and stamped.
Then beauty is its own excuse for being.
There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.
There are people who have an appetite for grief; pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation.
There are two classes of poets - the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.
There is a tendency for things to right themselves.
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance: that imitation is suicide: that he must take himself for better, or for worse.
There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.
There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.
They can conquer who believe they can. He has not learned the first lesson in life who does not every day surmount a fear.
Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.
Think, and be careful what thou art within; For there is sin in the desire of sin; Think, and be thankful, in a different case; For there is grace in the desire of grace.
This body, full of faults, Has yet one great quality: Whatever it encounters in this temporal life Depends upon one's actions.
This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
Those who stay away from the election think that one vote will do no good: 'Tis but one step more to think one vote will do no harm.
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened.
'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
To be great is to be misunderstood.
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - that is genius.
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child.
To the dull mind nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.
To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.
Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions; the surest poison is time.
Traveling is a fool's paradise... I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there besides me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.
Treat a man as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he could be, and he will become what he should be.
Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.
Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.
Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.
Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.
Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.
Washington, where an insignificant individual may trespass on a nation's time.
We acquire the strength we have overcome.
We aim above the mark to hit the mark.
We are always getting ready to live but never living.
We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.
We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of 4 or 500 pages.
We are wiser than we know.
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.
We do what we must, and call it by the best names.
We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
We must be our own before we can be another's.
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.
What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour.
What you do speak so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.
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.
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
When the eyes say one thing and the tongue another, the practiced person relies on the language of the first.
When we quarrel, how we wish we had been blameless.
Who you are speaks so loudly I can't hear what you're saying.
Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.
Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.
With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.
You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him.
The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.
When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.
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