Ralph Waldo Emerson
American essayist and poet, 1803-1882
100 quotes.
Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
- To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
- 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.
- Trust men, and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great.
- Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
- We acquire the strength we have overcome. Without war, no soldier; without enemies, no hero. The sun were insipid if the universe were not opaque.
- We are always getting ready to live, but never living.
- We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
- We know that the ancestor of every action is a thought.
- We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.
- We should be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of the best light.
- What is done for effect, is seen to be done for effect; what is done for love, is felt to be done for love.
- Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.
- Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
- You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be 'too late'.
- Once you make a decision the universe conspires to make it happen.
- Always do what you are afraid to do.
- He who is not everyday conquering some fear, has not learned the secret of life.
- Freedom is not the right to live as we please, but the right to find how we ought to live in order to fulfill our potential.
- Self-trust is the first secret of success.
- All successful people have agreed in being Causationists. They believe that they are the CAUSE for what happens to them. Unsuccessful men believe they are the EFFECT of what others have done to them or have not done for them