Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Why should the way I feel depend on the thoughts in someone else's head?

A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not "studying a profession," for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.

How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

Montaigne says, "Books are a languid pleasure," but I find certain books vital and spermatic, not leaving the reader what he was; he shuts the book a richer man. I would never willingly read any other than such.

thought can never ripen into truth.

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough

For every grain of wit, there is a grain of folly. For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something

Jangan sia-siakan waktu anda untuk ragu-ragu dan takut. Laksanakanlah pekerjaan yang ada di depan mata, sebab tugas asaat ini yang dilaksanakan dengan sebaik-baiknya akan menjadi persiapan terbaik untuk masa-masa yang akan datang.

In inquiries respecting the laws of the world and the frame of things, the highest reason is always the truest.

Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold then, he will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary.

A nation, like a tree, does not thrive well till it is engrafted with a foreign stock.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts.

Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail.

We are what we think about all day long.

Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in.

For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and houses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.

Nature will be reported. All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river, its channel in the soil; the animal, its bones in the stratum; the fern and leaf their modest epitaph in the coal.

That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.

Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in our own sunshine.

A world in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.

I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested: But these impulses may be from below, not from above. I replied: They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil.

A day is a miniature eternity.

It is better to hear than to speak.