Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make that man another you. One's enough.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
And fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore
With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The vanishing volatile froth of the present, which any shadow will alter, any thought blow away, any event annihilate, is every moment converted into the adamantine record of the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim. The Past is for us; but the sole terms on which it can become ours are its subordination to the Present. Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor. We must not tamper with the organic motion of the soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When a man is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We stand against fate, as children stand up against the wall in their father's house, and notch their height from year to year. But when the boy grows to a man, and is master of the house, he pulls down that wall and builds it new and bigger.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought

Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Born for success he seemed,
With grace to win, with heart to hold,
With shining gifts that took all eyes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The key to the period appeared to be that the mind had become aware of itself.... The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole subject we study and learn.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all;
And where it cometh, all things are;
And it cometh everywhere.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, there can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The man who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The sense of being which in calm hours arises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously from the same source.... Here is the fountain of action and of thought.... We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I see not any road of perfect peace which a man can walk but after the counsel of his own bosom.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
So in writing, there is always a right word, and every other than that is wrong. There is no beauty in words except in their collocation. The effect of a fanciful word misplaced, is like that of a horn of exquisite polish growing on a human head.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
I look on that man as happy, who, when there is a question of success, looks into his work for a reply.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Though love repine, and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply, —
"'Tis man's perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die."

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances... Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, — see how it could and must be.

Ralph Waldo Emerson