Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.

Neither is life long enough for friendship. That is a serious and majestic affair.

My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine.

The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.

I will no longer confer, differ, refer, defer, prefer, or suffer. I renounce the whole tribe of fero. I embrace absolute life.

Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.

By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.

Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen from the nook and chimneyside of prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front.

In the hands of the discoverer, medicine becomes a heroic art . . wherever life is dear he is a demigod.

Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find, without question.

Every thing admonishes us how needlessly long life is.

Our prejudices are our robbers, they rob us valuable things in life. People only see what they are prepared to see.

Life only avails, not the having lived.

It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.

There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.

Nature is the incarnation of thought. The world is the mind precipitated.

Our best thoughts come from others.

Yes, but does Maine have anything to SAY to Florida?

You cannot do a kindness too soon.

Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.