Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

The ornaments of our homes are the friends that visit it

Some people are born very far from home.

Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and carry home with them, and the cause is half won.

A man builds a fine house and now he has a master and a task for life is to furnish watch show it and keep it in repair the rest of his life.

Every great institution is the lengthened shadow of a single man. His character determines the character of the organization.

People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

It is greatest to believe and to hope well of the world, because he who does so, quits the world of experience, and makes the world he lives in.

A feeble man can see the farms that are fenced and tilled the houses that are built. The strong man sees the possible houses and farms. His eye makes estates as fast as the sun breeds clouds.

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

We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two elements, having two sets of faculties, the particular and the catholic.

People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.

Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.

Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.

Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.

It behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

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

He only is rich who owns the day.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.