Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Days Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, And marching single in an endless file, Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. To each they offer gifts after his will, Bread, kingdom, stars, and sky that holds them all. I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, Forgot my morning wishes, hastily Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day Turned and departed silent. I, too late, Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.

What a signal convenience is fame. Do we read all authors to grope our way to the best? No, but the world selects for us the best, and we select from these our best.

The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray.

Life is comic or pitiful as soon as the high ends of being fade out of sight, and man becomes near-sighted, and can only attend to what addresses the senses.

Everybody we know surrounds himself with a fine house, fine books, conservatory, gardens, equipage, and all manner of toys, as screens to interpose between himself and his guest. Does it not seem as if man was of a very sly, elusive nature, and dreaded nothing so much as a full rencontre front to front with his fellow?

Society we must have; but let it be society, and not exchanging news or eating from the same dish. Is it society to sit in one of your chairs? I cannot go to the houses of my nearest relatives, because I do not wish to be alone. Society exists by chemical affinity, and not otherwise.

Ser você mesmo em um mundo que está constantemente tentando fazer de você outra coisa é a maior realização.

I find that whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes. The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present moment; and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied.

Spiritual force is stronger than material force; thoughts rule the world.

The frolic architecture of the snow.

Tis not important how the hero does this or this, but what he is. What he is will appear in every gesture and syllable. In this way the moment and the character are one.

The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.

The best rule of reading will be a method from nature, and not a mechanical one of hours and pages.

Our thinking is a pious reception.

Man is a god in ruins.

Power is, in nature, the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing and therefore self-relying soul.

A man's fortunes are the fruit of his character.

The cramping influence of a hard formalist on a young child in repressing his spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding, and that without producing indignation, but only fear and obedience, and even much sympathy with his tyranny, - is a familiar fact explained to the child when he becomes a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of his youth is himself a child tyrannized over by those names and words and forma, of whose influence he was merely the organ to the youth.

The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.

But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account.

Iako putujemo svetom da na?emo lepotu, moramo je nositi sa sobom ili je ne?emo na?i.

Peace has its victories but it takes brave men to win them

for the hand can never execute any thing higher than the character can inspire.

What will you have? quoth God; pay for it, and take it.