Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement. This “Sage of Concord, Massachusetts” wrote Self-Reliance (1841) and other critical essays that have since achieved the status of holy writ.
Born in Boston, Emerson was deeply influenced by his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson. Even though she was not formally educated, she was talented and was widely read. She introduced Emerson to diverse philosophies and spiritual values—including the Hindu scriptures that he would revisit in his later years. It was Aunt Mary that motivated many of Emerson’s famous aphorisms, “Always do what you are afraid to do,” and “Despise trifles,” and “Oh, blessed, blessed poverty.”
Emerson got into Harvard at 14. There, he began keeping journals, which he called his “savings bank.” Later in life, he suggested this practice to his friend and protégé, the philosopher and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau.
Emerson was an average student and graduated in the middle of his Harvard Divinity School class. In the tradition of many family members before him, he became a Unitarian minister. However, in 1832, after his wife Ellen died of tuberculosis at the age of 19, he was deeply distressed and started to have misgivings about the teachings of the church.
Emerson toured Europe in 1833 and became a protégé of the Scottish philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle. After returning to America, he embarked on an exceptional literary career. In his book Nature (1836,) Emerson first introduced Transcendentalism, the idea that spiritual truth could be gained by intuition rather than by traditional doctrine or text.
Emerson was also a wisdom writer and an acclaimed public lecturer. Many of his essays began as journal entries, then developed into lectures, and later refined for publication. He gave some 1,500 speeches in his lifetime about not only his philosophical tenets but also individuality and freedom.
Emerson’s essays and lectures had a profound influence on the philosophers, authors, and poets who came after him. Most prominently, his beliefs and his idealism were strong influences on the works of Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, as well as numerous others. His writings are considered masterpieces of 19th-century American literature, religion, and thought.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson
He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, and he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Love, Enemies, Friendship
Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Goals
Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Simplicity
The real and lasting victories are those of peace and not of war.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Winning
Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Gambling, Luck
I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe, and is disappointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Value of Time, Time, Time Management
The man who makes a mistake and does not correct it, thereby makes another mistake.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
For every minute of anger, you lose sixty seconds of happiness.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the forest is perpetual youth.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Genius
Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is due to the triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Mr. Emerson visited Thoreau at the jail, and the meeting between the two philosophers must have been interesting and somewhat dramatic. The account of the meeting was told me by Miss Maria Thoreau Henry Thoreaus auntHenry, why are you here? Waldo, why are you not here?
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man I meet is in some way my superior. In that I learn of him.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
The past is for us, but the sole terms on which it can become ours are its subordination to the present.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Past
The better part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Experience, Courage, Bravery
Our faith comes in moments… yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Faith
England’s genius filled all measure
Of heart and soul, of strength and pleasure,
Gave to the mind its emperor,
And life was larger than before:
Nor sequent centuries could hit
Orbit and sum of Shakespeare’s wit.
The men who lived with him became
Poets, for the air was fame.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Fate, Existence
Let your enthusiasm radiate in your voice, your actions, your facial expressions, your personality, the words you use, and the thoughts you think! Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Enthusiasm, Greatness & Great Things, Accomplishment
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
Topics: Nature
It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune, and when you have got it, it requires ten times as much wit to keep it.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Wealth, Money
Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Worry
Will is the measure of power. To a great genius there must be a great will. If the thought is not a lamp to the will, does not proceed to an act, the wise are imbecile. He alone is strong and happy who has a will. The rest are herds. He uses; they are used. He is of the Maker; they are of the Made. Will is always miraculous, being the presence of God to men. When it appears in a man he is a hero, and all metaphysics are at fault.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Don’t be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don’t bewail and bemoan. Omit the negative propositions. Nerve us with incessant affirmatives. Don’t waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good. When that is spoken which has a right to be spoken, the chatter and the criticism will stop. Set down nothing that will help somebody.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Happiness
The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Resolve, Endurance, Perseverance, Beginning
‘Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: God
He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Growth
The one prudence of life is concentration.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Brevity
Make yourself necessary to somebody.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Necessity, Kindness, Giving, Service
Commerce is a game of skill, which every man cannot play, which few men can play well. The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call commonsense; a man of strong affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic. There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune; and so, in making money. Men talk as if there were some magic about this, and believe in magic, in all parts of life. He knows that all goes on the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent-for every effect a perfect cause-and that good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Economics, Life, Good, Luck, Perseverance, Purpose, Business
Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Time is indeed the theater and seat of illusions; nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century, and dwarfs an age to an hour.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: One liners, Wealth
The world looks like a mathematical equation which, turn it how you will, balances itself. Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
The ancestor of every action is a thought.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Thought, Action
Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Conversation, Communication, Speech
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