Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

We acquire the strength we have overcome.

Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.

A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.

We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.

There is one other reason for dressing well, namely that dogs respect it, and will not attack you in good clothes.

the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.

If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and adore.

Every wall is a door.

Treat a man as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he could be, and he will become what he should be.

God will not have his work made manifest by cowards

My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady.

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him.

Trust instinct to the end, even though you can give no reason.