Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is properly no history, only biography.

Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.

Live, let live, and help live

Preaching is the expression of moral sentiments applied to the duties of life.

But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's.

The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.

It is in rugged crises, in unbearable endurance, and in aims which put sympathy out of the question, that the angel is shown.

The secrets of life are not shown except to sympathy and likeness.

A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him.

In a cabinet of natural history, we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldy and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect.

The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men.

When there is sympathy, there needs but one wise man in a company and all are wise,--so, a blockhead makes a blockhead of his companion. Wonderful power to benumb possesses this brother.

The secret in education lies in respecting the student.

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

The man (or woman) who can make hard things easy is the educator.

The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings

Of course you will insist on modesty in the children, and respect to their teachers, but if the boy stops you in your speech, cries out that you are wrong and sets you right, hug him!

The cardinal virtue of a teacher [is] to protect the pupil from his own influence.

Experience is the only teacher, and we get his lesson indifferently in any school.

If a teacher have any opinion which he wishes to conceal, his pupils will become as fully indoctrinated into that as into any which he publishes.

We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them