Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Every wall is a door.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.

Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

Flowers… are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.

In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

Make yourself necessary to somebody.

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

We acquire the strength we have overcome.

We must be our own before we can be another’s.

A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.

Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.

If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.

We are wiser than we know.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

The highest revelation is that God is in every man.

Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

Beauty without expression is boring.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity; that, at least one may replace the parent.

Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

A man in debt is so far a slave.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.

We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.

America is another name for opportunity.

It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‚always do what you are afraid to do.‘

Every artist was first an amateur.

Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.

Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force – that thoughts rule the world.

A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.