Explore Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected.

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. . . .

A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

Only so much of life do I know as I have lived.

The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage, they form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows.

Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits.

Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.

Patience and fortitude conquer all things.

Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startles out wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.

God will not make himself manifest to cowards

Not the sun or summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what people think. This rule,equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.

Language is fossil Poetry.

That which we call sin in others is experiment for us.

Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I'm not afraid of falling into my inkpot.

All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.