Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

The reward of a thing well done is having done it.

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.

Money often costs too much

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant

Be an opener of doors

If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me.

The First wealth is health.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.

The world belongs to the energetic.

Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world; and beyond its world a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you: build, therefore, your own world.

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men,—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.

People destined to meet will do so, apparently by chance, at precisely the right moment.

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

We boil at different degrees.

Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows...

Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool.

At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say,—'Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act.