Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are prisoners of ideas.

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.

We become what we think about all day long.

We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves.

We take care of our health, we lay up money, we make our roof tight and our clothing sufficient, but who provides wisely that he shall not be wanting the best property of all -- friends?

What a new face courage puts on everything.

What a searching preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon of health.

What greater pain could mortals have than this To see their children dead before their eyes

What I must do is all that concerns me. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.

What is a weed A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

What is the hardest thing in the world To think.

What omniscience has music! So absolutely impersonal, yet every sufferer feels his secret sorrow soothed.

What we call results are beginnings.

What you are shouts so loud in my ears I cannot hear what you say.

What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.

What you see is what it is!

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves.

You cannot burn out until you catch on fire

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.

You must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

Always do what you are afraid to do.