Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is commonly observed that a sudden wealth, like a prize drawn in a lottery or a large bequest to a poor family, does not permanently enrich. They have served no apprenticeship to wealth, and with the rapid wealth come rapid claims which they do not know how to deny, and the treasure is quickly dissipated.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.

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
There is a remedy for every wrong and a satisfaction for every soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Night-dreams trace on Memory's wall Shadows of the thoughts of day, And thy fortunes, as they fall, The bias of the will betray.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner dependent and servile either on persons, or opinions, or possessions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide. Him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him because he did not need it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The wings of Time are black and white,
Pied with morning and with night.

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
Magic and all that is ascribed to it is a deep presentiment of the powers of science.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public. That statement only is fit to be made public, which you have come at in attempting to satisfy your own curiosity.

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
The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto him.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Spring still makes spring in the mind
When sixty years are told:
Love wakes anew this throbbing heart,
And we are never old
Over the winter glaciers
I see the summer glow
And through the wind-piled snowdrift
The warm rosebuds below.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our expense is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we run in debt; 'tis not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, not worship, that costs so much.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men are so charmed with valor that they have pleased themselves with being called lions, leopards, eagles and dragons, from the animals contemporary with us in the geologic formations.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Many a profound genius, I suppose, who fills the world with fame of his exploding renowned errors, is yet everyday posed and baffled by trivial questions at his own supper table.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
'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 unmistakably meant for his ear.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Water... transports vast boulders of rock in its iceberg a thousand miles. But its far greater power depends on its talent of becoming little, and entering the smallest holes and pores. By this agency, carrying in solution elements needful to every plant, the vegetable world exists.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours and ages that will follow it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The brevity of human life gives a melancholy to the profession of the architect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson