Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret.

The regular course of studies, the years of academical and professional education, have not yielded me better facts than some idle books under the bench at the Latin School.

That which we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so.

No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts, of his times shall have no share.

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance that imitation is suicide that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion.

The things taught in schools are not an education but the means of an education.

I pay the School Master but 'tis the school boys that educate my son.

The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education but the means of education.

Courage consists in equality to the problem before us.

There is always a best way of doing everything.

To accomplish excellence or anything outstanding, you must listen to that whisper which is heard by you alone.

We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint those qualities which we do not posses.

The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.

We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experience.

Faith makes us, and not we it; and faith makes its own forms.

There is genius as well in virtue as in intellect. 'Tis the doctrine of faith over works.

The Americans have many virtues, but they have not Faith and Hope. I know no two words whose meaning is more lost sight of.

The poem is a confession of faith.

It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak.

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

For flowers that bloom about our feet; For tender grass, so fresh, so sweet; For song of bird, and hum of bee; For all things fair we hear or see, Father in heaven, we thank Thee!