Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.

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

The greatest difficulty is that men do not think enough of themselves, do not consider what it is that they are sacrificing when they follow in a herd, or when they cater for their establishment

Self-sacrifice is the real miracle out of which all the reported miracles grow.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee.

It is as impossible for a man to be cheated by any one but himself, as for a thing to be and not to be at the same time.

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.

It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.

Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

The days are made on a loom whereof the warp and woof are past and future time. They are majestically dressed, as if every god brought a thread to the skyey web.

If a man carefully examines his thoughts he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future. His well-being is always ahead.

Every time you see a beautiful woman, just remember, somebody got tired of her

In the great books of India, an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence, which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the questions that exercise us.

Congratulate yourselves if you have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age.

Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library: a company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries in a thousand years.... The thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.

The experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet.

The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

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