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
One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Time, Day, Present, Time Management, Optimism, Delay, Carpe-diem
Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Worry
Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some men are born to own, and can animate all their possessions. Others cannot: their owning is not graceful; seems to be a compromise of their character: they seem to steal their own dividends.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Possessions, Character
Friends should be like books, easy to find when you need them, but seldom used.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Friendship
Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Health
The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Virtues, Virtue
Republics abound in young civilians who believe that the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes of living and employments of the population, that commerce, education and religion may be voted in or out; and that any measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people if only you can get sufficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand which perishes in the twisting; that the State must follow and not lead the character and progress of the citizen; that the form of government which prevails is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let us be silent that we may hear the whispers of the Gods.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
The years teach us much the days never knew.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
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: Time Management, Productivity, Carpe-diem, Time
Make yourself necessary to somebody.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Necessity, Kindness, Service, Giving
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
Rectitude is a perpetual victory, celebrated not by cries of joy, but by serenity, which is joy fixed or habitual.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
That only which we have within, can we see without. If we meet no Gods, it is because we harbor none. If there is a grandeur in you, you will find grandeur in porters and sweeps.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
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: Success, Doing Your Best, Results, Work
There is really no insurmountable barrier save your own inherent weakness of purpose.
—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
Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Heroes/Heroism, Heroes, Courage, Endurance, Perseverance, Resolve
Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Effort, Enthusiasm
I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Fashion
We are always getting ready to live, but never living.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Carpe-diem, Action, Preparation
Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances. It was somebody’s name, or he happened to be there at the time, or it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise.—Strong men believe in cause and effect.—The man was born to do it, and his father was born to be the father of him and of this deed, and by looking narrowly, you shall see there was no luck in the matter, but it was all a problem in arithmetic, or an experiment in chemistry.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Luck
Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Thought, Thoughts
The ancestor of every action is a thought.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Action, Thought
No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Learning
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Integrity, Attitude, Virtues
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
Good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed!
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Action
He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Topics: Growth
Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding.
—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
The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
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