Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Riding a horse is not a gentle hobby, to be picked up and laid down like a game of Solitaire. It is a grand passion.

Nothing can bring you happiness but yourself.

Talent finds its models, methods, and ends in society, exists for exhibition, and goes to the soul only for power to work. Genius is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture from within.

The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.

Wealth and poverty are seen for what they are. It begins to be seen that the poor are only they who feel poor, and poverty consists in feeling poor. The rich, as we reckon them, and among them the very rich, in a true scale would be found very indigent and ragged.

Courage consists in equality to the problem before us.

They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, etc., are in a lower dangerous plane, and invite the evil they fear.

We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.

Culture is one thing and varnish is another.

The foundation of culture, as of character, is at last the moral sentiment.

If you believe in fate, believe in it, at least, for your good.

The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.

Travel is a fools paradise.

Some eyes threaten like a loaded and levelled pistol, and others are as insulting as hissing or kicking; some have no more expression than blueberries, while others are as deep as a well which you can fall into.

There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.

God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth

Vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still nothing at last,--a long way leading nowhere.

That man is idle who can do something better.

A woman should always challenge our respect, and never move our compassion.

Earth laughs in flower

All my hurts my garden spade can heal

Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.

Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function.

Society always consists in the greatest part, of young and foolish persons.