Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I go into the garden with a spade and dig a bed I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.

One idea lights a thousand candles.

Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

To fill the hour,—that is happiness; to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval.

In the work of a writer of genius, we rediscover our own neglected thoughts.

I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. ... All that interests in any character [is this]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? ... Suicide is more respectable.

Else if you would be a man speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon balls, and to-morrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.

The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so; but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger, and mosquitoes and silly people.

Setiap buku adalah kutipan; setiap rumah adalah kutipan seluruh rimba raya dan tambang-tambang dan bebatuan; setiap manusia adalah kutipan dari semua leluhurnya

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst...They are for nothing but to inspire.

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

Let us even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying, Who are you? Unhand me: I will be dependent no more. Ah! seest thou not, O brother, that thus we part only to meet again on a higher platform, and only be more each other's, because we are more our own?

The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce.

It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.

Children are all foreigners.

Every calamity is a spur and a valuable hint.

The days come and go but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

That which we call sin in others is experiment for us.

There is no limit to what can be accomplished if it doesn't matter who gets the credit.

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken.

Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world: but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages.