Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

A part of fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in his soul.

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.

The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is.

Let a man behave in his own house as a guest.

Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.

Every man is a new method.

In every man's memory, with the hours when life culminated are usually associated certain books which met his views.

If we will not interfere with our thought, but will act entirely, or see how the thing stands in God, we know the particular thing, and every thing, and every man.

Think me not unkind and rude That I walk alone in grove and glen; I go to the god of the wood To fetch his word to men.

The permanence of all books is fixed by no effort friendly or hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to the constant mind of man.

I quote another man's saying; unluckily, that other withdraws himself in the same way, and quotes me.

Again, the great number of cultivated men keep each other up to a high standard. The habit of meeting well-read and knowing men teaches the art of omission and selection.

Fashion which affects to be honor, is often, in all men's experience, only a ballroom-code.

A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, and, however he may serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, cannot be saidto have arrived at self-possession.

When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen.

Is not, indeed, every man a student, and do not all things exist for the student's behoof?

All forms of government symbolize an immortal government, common to all dynasties and independent of numbers, perfect where two men exist, perfect where there is only one man.

A man in a cave or in a camp, a nomad, will die with no more estate than the wolf or the horse leaves.

Every man is the inlet and may become the outlet of all there is in God.

All men are poets at heart. They serve nature for bread, but her loveliness overcomes them sometimes.

What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects.

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.

Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?

It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune, and when you have it, it requires ten times as much skill to keep it.