Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense.

As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions.

So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the path of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours.

What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour.

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.

From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.

We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

Go put your creed into your deed.

Wouldst thou shut up the avenues of ill, Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.

Beauty is an outward gift, which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops—no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow.

There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

We must be our own before we can be another's.

Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort.

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book;… in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear.

Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar's dinner, from a hundred charities?

It is time to be old,To take in sail.

I like the silence of a church, before the service begins better than any preaching.

If the red slayer think he slays,Or if the slain think he is slain,They know not well the subtle waysI keep, and pass, and turn again.