Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Give me insight into today and you may have the antique and future worlds.

What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour?

For the resolute and determined, there is time and opportunity.

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.

There is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? Mor come to the conviction that what seems the succession of thought is only the distribution of wholes into causal series.

The poisons are our principal medicines, which kill the disease and save the life.

Life is wasted in the necessary preparation of finding what is the true way, and we die just as we enter it.

We are imprisoned in life in the company of persons powerfully unlike us.

The uses of travel are occasional, and short; but the best fruit it finds, when it finds it, is conversation; and this is a main function of life.

Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold it's great proportions.

I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant. Now we reckon them as bank-days, by some debt which is to be paid us, or which we are to pay, or some pleasure we are to taste.

Romeo, of dead, should be cut up into little stars to make the heavens fine. Life, with this pair, has no other aim, asks no more,than Juliet,--than Romeo.

The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct.

When I read a good book, I wish my life were three thousand years long.

All substances the cunning chemist Time Melts down into that liquor of my life.

The chief value of the new fact is to enhance the great and constant fact of life.

The dead sleep in their moonless night; my business is with the living.

It is not the irregular hours or irregular diet that makes the romantic life.

Cannot we let [children] be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make another you. One's enough.

Life too near paralyses art.

People suffer all their life long, under the foolish superstition that they can be cheated. But it is impossible for a person to be cheated by anyone but himself.

The divine gift is ever the instant life, which receives and uses and creates, and can well bury the old in the omnipotency with which Nature decomposes all her harvest for recomposition.

The brevity of human life gives a melancholy to the profession of the architect.

Life itself is ... a sleep within a sleep.