Ralph Waldo Emerson Learning Quotations

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.

Each mind has its own method. A true man never acquires after college rules.

Knowledge exists to be imparted.

Skill to do comes of doing.

The secret in education lies in respecting the student.

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.

Men succeed when they realize that their failures are the preparation for their victories.

Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.

Conversation is the laboratory and workshop of the student.

A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.

I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action.

Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, anecdote, and all flock to their aid.

Wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole subject we study and learn.

The proof of a high education is the ability to speak about complex matters as simply as possible.

Throughout the ages there have always been those who have been willing to go beyond the norms and reach for that unknown and distant star.

Excellence is the new forever.

This very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.

He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.

Let the bird sing without deciphering the song.

The man (or woman) who can make hard things easy is the educator.

When a man is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something.