Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Extremes meet, and there is no better example than the naughtiness of humility.

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.

If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it, at any rate, brag.

Why needs a man be rich? Why must he have horses, fine garments, handsome apartments, access to public houses, and places of amusement? Only for want of thought.

Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfillments; each of its joys ripens into a new want.

Let us not be too much acquainted. I would have a man enter his house through a hall filled with heroic and sacred sculptures, that he might not want the hint of tranquillity and self-poise.

The shot heard round the world.

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short in all management of human affairs.

Everything in nature goes by law, and not by luck.

A man in debt is so far a slave.

We aim above the mark to hit the mark.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

If a man own land, the land owns him.

Happiness is a perfume which you cannot pour on someone without getting some on yourself.

I can find my biography in every fable that I read.

It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.

A person seldom falls sick but the bystanders are animated with a faint hope that he will die.

Shall we judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely.

The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have 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.

Our greatest glory consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

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.

Obedience alone gives the right to command.