Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before, and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance, or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them, and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover.

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.

Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls.

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

You will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.

We boil at different degrees.

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generation beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe. Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?

Language is fossil Poetry.

Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of the table.

Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better.

Nothing can work damage to me except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me and never am a real sufferer except by my own fault.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things

There is no great and no small To the Soul that maketh all; And where it cometh, all things are; And it cometh everywhere.

Whatever course you decide upon there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires....courage.