Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Poverty Frost Famine Rain Disease are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense.

A day is a miniature eternity.

Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.

If the single man plants himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abides, this huge world will come around to him.

Do the thing and you will have the power.

Use language what you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.

It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourself.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood Their flag to April's breeze unfurl'd Here once the embattl'd farmers stood And fired the shot heard round the world.

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.

Money often costs too much.

Fear always springs from ignorance.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.

The high prize of life the crowning fortune of man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit which finds him in employment and happiness.

If I cannot brag of knowing something then I brag of not knowing it at any rate brag.

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.

To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not?

Wise men put their trust in ideas and not in circumstances.

One idea lights a thousand candles.

Trust men and they will be true to you treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.

The wise man in the storm prays God not for safety from danger but for deliverance from fear.

For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?

The flowering of geometry.

Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?

Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.

O Lord! Unhappy is the man whom man can make unhappy.

Live wastes itself while we are preparing to live.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

Does not… the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound?

Men achieve a certain greatness unawares when working to another aim.

All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are ... punished by fear.

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

PoetTo mask the fiery thought, in simple words succeeds.For still the craft of genius is, To mask a king in weeds

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion 20 years later.

It is one of the beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

A great man stands on God. A small man stands on a great man.

Happiness is a perfume which you cannot pour on someone without getting some on yourself.

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

America is a country of young men.

Love, and you shall be loved.

Pride ruined the angels.