A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
A friend might well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
A good intention but fixed and resolute - bent on high and holy ends, we shall find means to them on every side and at every moment; and even obstacles and opposition will but make us "like the fabled spectre-ships," which sail the fastest in the very teeth of the wind. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat; self-control is the rule. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man's library is a sort of harem. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man's wife has more power over him than the state has. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
All mankind love a lover. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end. though you can render no reason. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man has a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self? - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Children are all foreigners. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Common sense is genius dressed in working clothes. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol, and an audience is electrified. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for competitors. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little course, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice. Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do what you know and perception is converted into character. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is the triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every hero becomes a bore at last. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Happiness is a perfume which you cannot pour on someone without getting some on yourself. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
He is great who confers the most benefits. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
He who has a thousand friends Has not a friend to spare, While he who has one enemy Shall meet him everywhere. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hitch your wagon to a star. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
I like the silent church before the service begins, batter than any preaching. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
If a man knows the law, find out, though he live in a pine shanty, and resort to him. And if a man can pipe or sing, so as to wrap the imprisoned soul in an Elysium; or can paint a landscape, and convey into souls and ochres all the enchantments of Spring or Autumn; or can liberate and intoxicate all people who hear him with delicious songs and verses; it is certain that the secret cannot be kept; the first witness tells it to a second, and men go by fives and tens and fifties to his doors. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which should be a place of delightful labour, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits. I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in? - Ralph Emerson
It is not length of life, but depth of life. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life, that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is very easy in the world to live by the opinion of the world. It is very easy in solitude to be self-centred. But the finished man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. I knew a man of simple habits and earnest character who never put out his hands nor opened his lips to court the public, and having survived several rotten reputations of younger men, honour came at last and sat down with him upon his private bench from which he had never stirred. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, "Always do what you are afraid to do." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is eating us up. We all shall be fables presently. Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man is a piece of the universe made alive. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by 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 labour drives out brute labour. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men are what their mothers made them. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlours without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature hates calculators. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Never read any book that is not a year old. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
No great man ever complains of want of opportunity. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
No man ever prayed heartily without learning something. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is a million fathoms deep. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Often a certain abdication of prudence and foresight is an element of success. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
People only see what they are prepared to see. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
People wish to be settled. It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Proverbs are the literature of reason, or the statements of absolute truth, without qualification. Like the sacred books of each nation, they are the sanctuary of its intuitions. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self-trust is the essence of heroism. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sooner of later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon-balls and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's opinions. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Strong men greet war, tempest, hard times. They wish, as Pindar said, to tread the floors of hell, with necessities as hard as iron. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Take egotism out and you would castrate the benefactors. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tell them dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, Then beauty is its own excuse for being: Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose! I never sought to ask, I never knew: But, in my simple ignorance suppose The selfsame power that brought me there brought you. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The ancestor of every action is a thought. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended halfness; a non performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, is comedy and it announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call laughter. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The faith that stand on authority is not faith. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him with his friendship. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The greatest homage we can pay truth is to use it. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conducted, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed, there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennuis, vanish, - all duties even. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The next thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only reward of virtue is virtue. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only way to have a friend is to be one. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatest, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The reward for a thing well done is to have done it. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The sufferers parade their miseries, tear lint from their bruises, reveal their indictable crimes, that you may pity them. They like sickness, because physical pain will extort some show of interest from bystanders, as we have seen children, who, finding themselves of no account when grown people come in, will cough till they choke, to draw attention. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The years teach much which the days never knew. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are two classes of poets - the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is always room for a man of force, and he makes room for many. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no strong performance without a little fanaticism in the performer. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into a power. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is nothing capricious in nature and the implanting of a desire indicates that its gratification is in the constitution of the creature that feel it. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
This time, like all time, is a very good one if we but know what to do with it. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
To be great is to be misunderstood. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men-that is genius. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
To fill the hour-that is happiness. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded! - Ralph Waldo Emerson
To share often and much; to leave the world a little better; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. That is to have succeeded. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the Illuminated mind the whole world burns and sparkle with lights. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
We aim above the mark to hit the mark. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are always getting ready to live but never living. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are born believing. A man bears beliefs, as a tree bears apples. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are prisoners of ideas. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyfull of words and do not know a thing. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are wiser than we know. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
We boil at different degrees. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
What a searching preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon of health. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Who so would be a man, must be a nonconformist. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Women see better than men. Men see lazily, if they do not expect to act. Women see quite without any wish to act. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Work is victory. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he know that every day is Doomsday. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. - Ralph Waldo Emerson