Inspirational Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Philosopher)

Inspirational Quotations 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

The ancestor of every action is a thought.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Action, Thought

Men lose their tempers in defending their taste.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Anger

Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Power, Greatness & Great Things, Success, Soul, Enthusiasm, Faith, Accomplishment

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Attitude, Happiness, Anger, One liners

He has not learned the first lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Belief, Fear, Self-reliance, Believe, Confidence, Winning, Time Management, Value of Time

The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Wisdom

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other, and thus makes him necessary to society.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Power, Nature, Talents, Society, Life, Work, Abilities

Work, every hour, paid or unpaid; see only that thou work and thou canst not escape thy reward. Whether thy work be fine or coarse, planting corn, or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses, as well as to the thought. The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Work, Doing Your Best, Success, Results

That which we persist in doing becomes easier – not that the nature of the task has changed, but our ability to do has increased.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Resolve, Beginning, Perseverance, Endurance

What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Imagination

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

What I need is someone who will make me do what I can.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Ability, Vision

So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine, and so much in retrospect, that the amount of each person’s genius is confined to a very few hours.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Productivity, Carpe-diem, Time Management, Time

In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Learning

It is proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Simplicity

Life is eating us up. We shall be fables presently. Keep cool: It will all be one a hundred years hence.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Aging, Worry

We are always getting ready to live, but never living.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Action, Preparation, Carpe-diem

Sorrow looks back, worry looks around, faith looks up.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Belief, Worry, Sorrow, Faith

A good intention clothes itself with power.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

The secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy. A man who is not happy in company, cannot find any word in his memory that will fit the occasion; all his information is a little impertinent. A man who is happy there, finds in every turn of the conversation occasions for the introduction of what he has to say. The favorites of society are able men, and of more spirit than wit, who have no uncomfortable egotism, but who exactly fill the hour and the company, contented and contenting.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Success, Society, Friendship

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on yesterdays.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Success & Failure, Achievement, Memory

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: Accomplishment, Enthusiasm, Greatness & Great Things

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

Character is higher than intellect… a great soul will be strong to live, as well as to think.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Intelligence, Character, Integrity

Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Goals, Vision

At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
—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

Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
—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: Enemies, Love, Friendship

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Health

The day is always (hers or) his, who works in it with serenity and great aims.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: War

The years teach us much the days never knew.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor.—As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Evil

Every man I meet is in some way my superior. In that I learn of him.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is only as a man puts off from himself all external support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man is what he thinks about all day long.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Thoughts, Thought, Positive Attitudes, Thinking, Optimism