Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

Life is short, but there is always time enough for courtesy.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

You are constantly invited to be what you are.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Even in the mud and scum of things, something always, always sings.

Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest.

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.

Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.

We are always getting ready to live, but never living.

Love, and you shall be loved.

Fear always springs from ignorance.

When you were born you were crying and everyone else was smiling. Live your life so at the end, your're the one who is smiling and everyone else is crying.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

Beauty without expression is boring.

The years teach much the days never know.

Whatever course you decide upon there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires....courage.

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 wise man in the storm prays God not for safety from danger but for deliverance from fear.

Be good to your work, your word, and your friend.