Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.

There are two laws discrete,Not reconciled—Law for man, and law for thing.

Some of your hurts you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived, But what torments of grief you endured From the evil which never arrived.

There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.

One thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.

Tell them dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, Then beauty is its own excuse for being

States!... Go put your creed into your deed.

Fame is proof that the people are gullible.

There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things.

Power and speed be hands and feet.

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please — you can never have both.

Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?

For it is not meters, but a metermaking argument that makes a poem—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.

Never read any book that is not a year old.

All the mistakes I make arise from forsaking my own station and trying to see the object from another person's point of view.

God screens us evermore from premature ideas.

Almost all people descend to meet.

Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.

The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.

No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

To live without duties is obscene.