Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every man's Reason is sufficient for his guidance, if used.

A determined man, by his very attitude and the tone of his voice, puts a stop to defeat, and begins to conquer.

He is only rich who owns the day. There is no king, rich man, fairy, or demon who possesses such power as that.

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

Every man is an impossibility until he is born.

No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic also.

A man complained that on his way home to dinner he had every day to pass through that long field of his neighbor's. I advised him to buy it, and it would never seem long again.

No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.

To a physician, each man, each woman, is an amplification of one organ.

I have heard that death takes us away from ill things, not from good. I have heard that when we pronounce the name of man we pronounce the belief of immortality.

That is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual; the wise man wonders at the usual.

Every man contemplates an angel in his future self.

For what are they all in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet?

Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.

There is a good ear, in some men, that draws supplies to virtue out of very indifferent nutriment.

As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man.

No man gains credit for his cowardly courtesies.

The great majority of men grow up and grow old in seeming and following.

There is no eloquence without a man behind it.

A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.

The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.

If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply, the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential.

Wise men read very sharply all of your private history in your look and gait and behavior.

Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State.