Ralph Waldo Emerson

668 quotes

"A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A man's wife has more power over him than the state has."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The reason why all men honor love is because it looks up, and not down; aspires and not despairs."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I used to always think that I'd look back on us crying and laugh, but, I never thought I'd look back on us laughing and cry."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which can love us and which we can love."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"What lies before us and what lies behind us, is small compared to what lies within us."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Defect in manners is usually the defect of fine perceptions. Elegance comes of no breeding, but of birth."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"You can take better care of your secret than another can."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A true friend is somebody who can make us do what we can."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Heaven always bears some proportion to earth. The god of the cannibal will be a cannibal, of the crusades a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel, and hangs on every other sail in the horizon."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"They can conquer who believe they can. He has not learned the first lesson in life who does not every day surmount a fear."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Nobody can bring you peace but yourself."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A great man is always willing to be little."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"It is easy to live for others; everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The man who can make hard things easy is the educator."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Each man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well. He has changed his market-cart into a chariot of the sun."

Ralph Waldo Emerson