Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

The exceptional life depends not on working harder, but on different, even opposite, actions from habit and the crowd.

Nothing great ever happened without enthusiasm.

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.

The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

My life is not an apology, but a life.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.

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.

Even in the mud and scum of things, something always, always sings.

Life is March weather, savage and serene in one hour.

All life is a nap. The more naps you take the better.

We grant no dukedoms to the few, We hold like rights and shall; Equal on Sunday in the pew, On Monday in the mall. For what avail the plough or sail, Or land, or life, if freedom fail?

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.

The first thing a great person does is make us realize the insignificance of circumstance.

It is about your outlook towards life. You can either regret or rejoice.

When we have arrived at the question, the answer is already near.

Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms.

Go forth into the busy world and love it. Interest yourself in its life, mingle kindly with its joys and sorrows.

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.

Beauty is an outward gift, which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

There is a tendency for things to right themselves.

Our strength grows out of our weakness.

We acquire the strength we have overcome.