Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.

Do what you fear and your fear will die.

Knowledge is the antidote to fear,- Knowledge, Use and Reason, with its higher aids.

All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are ... punished by fear.

Fear is cruel and mean.

They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, etc., are in a lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they fear.

Teach me your mood, O patient stars. Who climb each night, the ancient sky. leaving on space no shade, no scars, no trace of age, no fear to die.

O friend, never strike sail to a fear!

Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.

So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the path of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours.

When the act of reflection takes place in the mind, when we look at ourselves in the light of thought, we discover that our life is embosomed in beauty.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

Every man is a borrower and a mimic, life is theatrical and literature a quotation

With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.

Always do what you are afraid to do.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.

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

Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.

They can conquer who believe they can. He has not learned the first lesson in life who does not every day surmount a fear.

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. 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.

Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours and ages that will follow it.

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived - that is to have succeeded.

How much of human life is lost in waiting.

Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live.