Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Insist on yourself; never imitate.

A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life.

Thought is the property of those only who can entertain it. -

People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own, quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in a world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority

All history is biography.

Do not say things. Who you are thunders over you all the while so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.

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

Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.

A difference of taste in jokes, is a great strain on the affections.

Every man's Reason is sufficient for his guidance, if used.

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

Life is a festival only to the wise.

Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.

Tomorrow, a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time.

The poets made all the words and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.

That which befits us, embosomed in beauty and wonder as we are, is cheerfulness, and courage, and the endeavor to realize our aspirations. Shall not the heart which has received so much, trust the Power by which it lives? May it not quit other leadings, and listen to the Soul that has guided it so gently, and taught it so much, secure that the future will be worthy of the past?

The world we live in is but thickened light.

Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.

The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires.

I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things

Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?

Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.

Doing well is a result of doing good.