Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Who you are is speaking so loudly that I can't hear what you're saying

The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul.

nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it.

The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who ever could clutch it?

That which we are, we shall teach, not voluntarily, but involuntarily. Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage, they form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows.

A man is a god in ruins.When men are innocent,life shall be longer and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

The day is always (hers or) his, who works in it with serenity and great aims.

For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The by-standers look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's parlour. If this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his own, he might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs.

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

Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first.

Keep your friendships in repair.

He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.

the sense of being which in calm hours arises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously from the same source.... Here is the fountain of action and of thought.... We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.

Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the orphan, and the sons of genius fear and hate;--debt, which consumes so much time, which so cripples and disheartens a great spirit with cares that seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be forgone, and is needed most by those who suffer from it most.

Imitation cannot go above its model.

The surest poison is time.

All great speakers were bad speakers at first.

The most wonderful inspirations die with their subject, if he has no hand to paint them to the senses.

Some of your hurts you have cured, and the sharpest you've even survived. But what torments of grief you've endured from evils which never arrived - Ralph Waldo Emerson