Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Philosopher)

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

Live, let live, and help live
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Life

A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Effort, Work, Happiness

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith ‘A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!’
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Aging, Age, The Future, Love, Tomorrow

Fame is proof that people are gullible.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Fame

Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Society

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 key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: New, Act, Thoughts, Thought, Win

The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Truth

Today is a king in disguise.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: The Present, Present

Work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Chance, Fortune, Luck

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
Topics: Planning

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.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Nature, Stars

Thus we feed on genius, and refresh ourselves from too much conversation with our mates, and exult in the depth of nature in that direction in which he leads us. What indemnification is one great man for populations of pigmies! Every mother wishes one son a genius, though all the rest should be mediocre. But a new danger appears in the excess of influence of the great man. His attractions warp us from our place. We have become underlings and intellectual suicides. Ah! yonder in the horizon is our help;- other great men, new qualities, counterweights and checks on each other. We cloy of the honey of each peculiar greatness. Every hero becomes a bore at last. Perhaps Voltaire was not bad-hearted, yet he said of the good Jesus, even, I pray you, let me never hear that man’s name again. They cry up the virtues of George Washington,- Damn George Washington! is the poor Jacobin’s whole speech and confutation. But it is human nature’s indispensable defense. The centripetence augments the centrifugence. We balance one man with his opposite, and the health of the state depends on the see-saw.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Leadership, Heroes, Heroism

Do not spill thy soul in running hither and yon, grieving over the mistakes and the vices of others. The one person whom it is most necessary to reform is yourself.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Self-Discovery

He who loves goodness harbors angels, reveres reverence, and lives with God.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Goodness

We are ashamed of our thoughts and often see them brought forth by others.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Thoughts, Thought

Every hero becomes a bore at last.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are faces so fluid with expression, so flushed and rippled by the play of thought, that we can hardly find what the mere features really are.—When the delicious beauty of lineaments loses its power, it is because a more delicious beauty has appeared—that an interior and durable form has been disclosed.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Face

Man was born to be rich, or, grows rich by the use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players. Cultivated labor drives out brute labor.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Property, Wealth, Riches

If we live truly, we shall see truly.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Life

In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Conversation

All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are speedily punished—by fear…be honest with a man and you have no fear. Try to deceive and the relationship deteriorates.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Love, Act, Fear, Try, Action

Self-command is the main discipline.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Discipline

No land is bad, but land is worse. If a man owns land, the land owns him. Now let him leave home, if he dare.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Property, Wilderness

Earth laughs in flowers.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Earth, Money, Gardening, Flowers, One liners

In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoon how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Art

We own to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man man.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Man

There is no eloquence without a man behind it.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Eloquence

You send your child to the schoolmaster, but ’tis the schoolboys who educate him.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Education, School

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden’s end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Snow

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