Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

We as we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-pulling, but guiding, instructive, and inspirational--a south wind and not an east wind.

Thus we do not carry a counsel in our breasts, or do not know it; and because we cannot shake off from our shoes this dust of Europe and Asia, the world seems to be born old, society is under a spell, every man is a borrower and a mimic, life is theatrical and literature a quotation; and hence that depression of spirits, that furrow of care, said to mark every American brow.

Bir tehdit kar??s?nda tazelenen insanlar vard?r. Tutum ve tasarruf melekelerini deÄŸil; anlay??, sabitlik, özveriye haz?r olma gibi özellikleri ÅŸart koÅŸarak, çoÄŸunluÄŸu korkutan ve felç eden bir buhran, bu insanlara t?pk? gelinleri gibi güzel ve sevilesi gelir. s.178

En la comunidad, es fácil vivir según ideas ajenas. En la soledad, es fácil vivir según las ideas propias. Pero solo es notable el que, en la comunidad, conseva la independencia.

We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables

All my good is magnetic, and I educate, not by lessons, but by going about my business.

We're only afraid of or repulsed by what we don't understand.

The shows of day, the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, and the like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality. Go out of the house to see the moon, and 't is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey.

Emerson's own best insight into fame is in his essay on Character. The most dismaying aspect of fame from the point of view of its possessor is not just that fame is generally disproportionate to actual achievement, but that the fame that we first assume to be a reward for work well done becomes instead an impossible promise of about future work. Fame casts an anticipatory chill over current efforts because it awakens expectations that can never fully be met.

Each creature is only a modification of the other; the likeness in them is more than the difference, and their radical law is one and the same.

Non essere spinto dai tuoi problemi. Lasciati guidare dai tuoi sogni.

Do not be an unwise churl and rail at society nor so worldly wise as to condemn solitude. But use them as conditions. Be their master, not their slave. Make circumstance,—all circumstance, conform to the law of your mind. Be always a king, and not they, and nothing shall hurt you.

Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal greatness. Willingly does she follow his steps with the rose and the violet, and bend her lines of grandeur and grace to the decoration of her darling child. Only let his thoughts be of equal scope, and the frame will suit the picture

The ray of light passes invisible through space, and only when it falls on an object is it seen.

Men hear gladly of the power of blood or race. Everybody likes to know that his advantages cannot be attributed to air, soil, sea, or to local wealth, as mines and quarries, nor to laws and traditions, nor to fortune, but to superior brain, as it makes the praise more personal to him.

Man runs about restless and in pain when his condition or the objects about him do not fully match his thought.

Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles.

Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.

Every artist was first an amateur

Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.

I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe, and is disappointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods.

The landscape belongs to the person who looks at it.

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; [168] the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.