Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.

Let the reader find that he cannot afford to omit any line of your writing because you have omitted every word that he can spare.

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

There is no knowledge that is not power.

He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.

Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas, sometimes with chisel on stone, sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul's worship is builded; sometimes in anthems of indefinite music, but clearest and most permanent, in words.

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.

though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.

Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.

The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.

So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the path of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours.

Not the sun or summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight.

Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact makes much impression on him, and another none.

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, — What is truth? and of the affections, — What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. ... Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.

It is not the length of life, but the depth of life. He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.

Men are respectable only as they respect.

Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on midnoon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind.

She shows us only surfaces but Nature is a million fathoms deep.

Years teach much which the days never knew.

It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other; and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in Paradise again.