Ralph Waldo Emerson
American essayist and poet, 1803-1882
100 quotes.
Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Make yourself necessary to the world and mankind will give you bread.
- Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.
- Men hold themselves cheap and vile: and yet a man is a fagot of thunderbolts.
- No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.
- Nothing can bring you peace but yourself; nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
- Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
- Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
- Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
- Nothing is beneath you, if it is in the direction of your life: nothing is great or desirable, if it is off from that.
- Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.
- One of the illusions is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
- Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.
- Our strength grows out of our weakness.
- Self-trust is the essence of heroism.
- Shallow men believe in luck, wise and strong men in cause and effect.
- That which we are we are all the while teaching, not voluntarily, but involuntarily.
- The best lightning-rod for your protection is your own spine.
- The characteristic of heroism is its persistency.
- The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
- The great man loves the conversation or the book that convicts him, not that which soothes or flatters him.
- The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.
- The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
- The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation.
- The only person you are destined to become, is the person you decide to be.
- The only way to have a friend is to be one.
- The power men possess to annoy me I give them.
- The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.
- The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.
- The sum of wisdom is, that the time is never lost that is devoted to work.
- The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops, but the kind of man that the country turns out.
- The way to mend the bad world, is to create the right world.
- The wise man in the storm prays God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.
- There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance.
- There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg.
- There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.
- There is no eloquence without a man behind it.
- There is no strong performance without a little fanaticism in the performer.
- There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into a power, and organizes a huge instrumentality of means.
- This world belongs to the energetic.
- To be great is to be misunderstood.