Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.

The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution.

A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.

'Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare To die, and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare The shaft we raise to them and thee.

The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.

We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no history; only biography.

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.

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

Happy is the house that shelters a friend.

Things are of the snake.

Sickness is poor-spirited, and cannot serve anyone; it must husband its resources to live. But health or fullness answers its own ends, and has to spare, runs over, and inundates the neighborhoods and creeks of other men's necessities.

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight which a verse gives in happy quotation than in the poem.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.

Give all to love;Obey thy heart;Friends, kindred, days,Estate, good fame,Plans, credit and the Muse,Nothing refuse.

The scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state he is Man Thinking.

I am the owner of the sphere,Of the seven stars and the solar year,Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain,Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain.

Self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God.

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I'm not afraid of falling into my inkpot.

God said, I am tired of kings,I suffer them no more;Up to my ear the morning bringsThe outrage of the poor.