Ralph Waldo Emerson Life Quotations

He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.

The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.

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.

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

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

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

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

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

The reward of a thing well done is having done it.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

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

It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

As soon as there is life there is danger.

Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.

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

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life.

Wherever the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation.

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.

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

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.

A chief event in life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us

In the hands of the discoverer, medicine becomes a heroic art . . . wherever life is dear he is a demigod.

We are imprisoned in life in the company of persons powerfully unlike us.

We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men aboutus are dupes. But life is a sincerity.

Every thing admonishes us how needlessly long life is.

I would study, I would know, I would admire forever.

The work of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark and leaf-buds.

Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen from the nook and chimneyside of prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front.

The secret of culture is to learn, that a few great points steadily reappear, alike in the poverty of the obscurest farm, and in the miscellany of metropolitan life, and that these few are alone to be regarded,--the escape from all false ties; courage to be what we are; and love what is simple and beautiful; independence and cheerful relation, these are the essentials,--these, and the wish to serve,--to add somewhat to the well-being of men.

We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause.

Life itself is ... a sleep within a sleep.

Come out of the azure. Love the day. Do not leave the sky out of your landscape.

When the act of reflection takes place in the mind, when we look at ourselves in the light of thought, we discover that our life is embosomed in beauty.

We do not live an equal life, but one of contrasts and patchwork; now a little joy, then a sorrow, now a sin, then a generous or brave action.

There is nothing capricious in nature and the implanting of a desire indicates that its gratification is in the constitution of the creature that feel it.

We ask for long life, but 'tis deep life, or noble moments that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical.

Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.

The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.

The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship

If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being.

Every man I meet is in some way my superior.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

All mankind love a lover.

The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but for the deliverance from fear. It is the storm within that endangers him, not the storm without.

Love, and you shall be loved.

Convert life into truth.

How much of human life is lost in waiting.

When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest things we can know.

Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

Live, let live, and help live

Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.

The years teach much which the days never know.

Every man believes he has a greater possibility.

The first wealth is health.

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

To me, however, the question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live? We are incompetent to solve the times. Our geometry cannot span the huge orbits of the prevailing ideas, behold their return, and reconcile their opposition. We can only obey our own polarity.

Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find, without question.

Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight.

I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant. Now we reckon them as bank-days, by some debt which is to be paid us, or which we are to pay, or some pleasure we are to taste.

Life loiters at the book's first page,-- Ah! could we turn the leaf.

The delicious faces of children, the beauty of school-girls, "the sweet seriousness of sixteen," the lofty air of well-born, well-bred boys, the passionate histories in the looks and manners of youth and early manhood, and the varied power in all that well-known company that escort us through life,--we know how these forms thrill, paralyze, provoke, inspire, and enlarge us.

[A]s if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand....

Rings and jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a stone; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing.

The first thing a great person does is make us realize the insignificance of circumstance.

When you have worn out your shoes, the strength of the show fiber has passed into your body.

Every man is a borrower and a mimic, life is theatrical and literature a quotation.

When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and rustle of the corn.

Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.

A man cannot utter two or three sentences without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life and thought, whether in the kingdom of the senses and the understanding, or in that of ideas and imagination, or in the realm of intuitions and duty.

Life is March weather, savage and serene in one hour.

Life is too short to waste . . . 'Twill soon be dark; Up! mind thine own aim, and God speed the mark!

He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession', for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.

In the hands of the discoverer, medicine becomes a heroic art . . wherever life is dear he is a demigod.

Life is a search after power.

The life of man is a self-evolving circle.

We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force, and so do lean and beg day and night continually.

The House ...She lays her beams in music, In music every ore, To the candence of the whirling world Which dances round the sun- That so they shall not be displaced By lapses or by wars, But for the love of happy souls Out live the newest stars.

Life only avails, not the having lived.

What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects.

Life too near paralyses art.

Preaching is the expression of moral sentiments applied to the duties of life.

A man passes for that he is worth. What he is engraves itself on his face, on his form, on his fortunes, in letters of light. Concealment avails him nothing; boasting nothing. There is confession in the glances of our eyes; in our smiles; in salutations; and the grasp of hands.

We can only be valued as we make ourselves valuable.

Men of sense esteem wealth to be the assimilation of nature to themselves, the converting of the sap and juices of the planet to the incarnation and nutriment of their design.

Every man believes that he has greater possibilities.