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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Henry David Thoreau American Philosopher
- Walt Whitman American Poet
- Charles Sanders Peirce American Philosopher
- Amos Bronson Alcott American Teacher
- John Cage American Composer
- John Weiss American Author
- Kahlil Gibran Lebanese-born American Philosopher
- William James American Philosopher
- Eric Hoffer American Philosopher
- John Dewey American Philosopher
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