Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know...

It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books.

FOR EVERY STOIC WAS A STOIC BUT WHERE IN CHRISTENDOM IS THE CHRISTIAN?

Miss Austen's novels … seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer … is marriageableness.

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.

There is no one who does not exaggerate. In conversation, men are encumbered with personality, and talk to much.

They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature.

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year.

The skill to do comes of doing.

A person seldom falls sick, but the bystanders are animated with a faint hope that he will die.

Life is an experiment. The more experiments the better

Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations.

Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.

Napoleon said of Massena, that he was not himself until the battle began to go against him; then, when the dead began to fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination, and he put on terror and victory as a robe. So it is in rugged crises, in unweariable endurance, and in aims which put sympathy out of question, that the angel is shown.

The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be

Virtues are in the popular estimate rather the exception than the rule.

Me too thy nobleness has taught To master my despair; The fountains of my hidden life Are through thy friendship fair.

Congratulate yourself if you have broken the monotony of a conventional age

If you would lift me you must be on higher ground. If you would liberate me you must be free. If you would correct my false view of facts, — hold up to me the same facts in the true order of thought, and I cannot go back from the new conviction.

But the best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions; and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien.

When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know.

Let the Stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.

Quotation confesses inferiority.

We do not believe our own thought; we must serve somebody; we must quote somebody; we dote on the old and the distant; we are tickled by great names; we import the religion of other nations; we quote their opinions; we cite their laws.