Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.

This surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but sliding.

It is better to be the thorn in the side of your friend than his echo

Conservatives and Progressives. These two parties, which divide our government—and every other government—have been fighting for control of the world from the very beginning. History is the chronicle of their battles: between nobles and commoners, rulers and rebels, old traditions and new ideas, the rich and the poor. As the world turns, one side gets the upper hand, then the other, and back again. Only the names change.

The energy of the mind is commensurate with the work to be done.

The man is only a half himself, the other half is his expression

Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse.

Wherever a man comes, there comes a revolution. The old is for slaves.

For it is a fire that kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature with its generous flames.

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life.

Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us.

fate is for imbeciles; all is possible to the resolved mind.

Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scanderbeg, and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue?

If utterance is denied, the thought lies like a burden on the man.

Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

the poor man, whom the law does not allow to take an ear of corn when starving, nor a pair of shoes for his freezing feet, is allowed to put his hand into the pocket of the rich, and say, You shall educate me, not as you will, but as I will...

We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent we have discovered afterward that much was accomplished and much was begun in us.

What's the use of an admirable form of government if political parties and moneyed interests control it? What's the use of our judicial system, if judges only quote precedents and ignore first principles? What's the use of a Supreme Court if it's swayed by the political winds of the hour?

An idea lights a thousand candles.

Those who have ruled human destinies, like planets, for thousands of years, were not handsome men.

we are what we know.

Every man is an impossibility until he is born; every thing impossible until we see a success.

Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.