Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

As we are, so we do; and as we do, so is it done to us; we are the builders of our fortunes.

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?

Go where there is no path and leave a trail.

Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.

Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.

Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are.

The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who knows why will always be his boss.

Practice radical humility. He (or she)who masters the art of humility cannot be humiliated...

Never read a book that is not a year old.

In art the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can inspire.

Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.

Beauty is the virtue of the body as virtue is the beauty of the soul

Only so much of life do I know as I have lived.

Let us take our bloated nothingness out of the path of the divine circuits.

Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.

Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood. -Is it so bad, then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood...

Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.

Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us.

My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.

But, if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from these heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime... But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but retire a little from sight and afterwards return again.

When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.

We talk of choosing our friends, but our friends are self-elected.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.