Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there's a great difference in the beholders.

The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.

Who loses a day loses life.

The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

He has not learned the first lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.

The surest poison is time.

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

Glittering generalities! They are blazing ubiquities.

There are three wants which can never be satisfied: that of the rich, who want something more; that of the sick, who want something different; and that of the traveler, who says, "Anywhere but here."

Men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places.

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

Philanthropies and charities have a certain air of quackery.

When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies, "Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life."

All men are poets at heart.

Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.

There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be only to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things.

There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for then we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

There are people who have an appetite for grief; pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation.

A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like unto him wherever he goes. What you are comes to you.

The greatest man in history was the poorest.

Some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise.

Alas for the unhappy man that is called to stand in the pulpit, and not give the bread of life.