Ralph Waldo Emerson Time Quotations

The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

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

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.

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

The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance.

Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.

The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.

Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.

Many time the reading of a book has made the future of a man.

This time is a very good one if we but know what to do with it

Times of heroism are generally times of terror, but the day never shines in which this element may not work.

The inmost in due time becomes the outmost.

For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy.

Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. The spirit sports with time.

A moment is a concentrated eternity.

Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible, and divine in its coming, is slit and peddled into trifles and tatters. A door is to bepainted, a lock to be repaired. I want wood, or oil, or meal, or salt; the house smokes, or I have a headache; then the tax; and an affair to be transacted with a man without heart or brains; and the stinging recollection of an injurious or very awkward word,--these eat up the hours.

There is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? Mor come to the conviction that what seems the succession of thought is only the distribution of wholes into causal series.

There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained by the hours.

We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn ahundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life.

Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness,--these are the threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life.

The days are made on a loom whereof the warp and woof are past and future time. They are majestically dressed, as if every god brought a thread to the skyey web.

There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato:-never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to every generation these come duly down, for the sake of those few persons, as if God brought them written in his hand.

My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock should find the time in my face.

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

Many times the reading of a book has made the future of a man.

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

So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine, and so much in retrospect, that the amount of each person's genius is confined to a very few hours.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

The surest poison is time.

Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.

Every time you wink the stars move.

How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without place to insert an atom--in graceful succession, in equal fullness, in balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and boundless. It will not be dissected, nor unraveled, nor shown.

Grow angry slowly - there's plenty of time.

'Well,' said Red Jacket [to someone complaining that he had not enough time], 'I suppose you have all there is.'

The truth, the hope of any time, must always be sought in minorities.

Nature is methodical, and doeth her work well. Time is never to be hurried.

The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time.

The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended halfness; a non performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, is comedy and it announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call laughter.

I find nothing in fables more astonishing than my experience in every hour. One moment of a man's life is a fact so stupendous as to take the luster out of fiction.

Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.

Give me insight into today and you may have the antique and future worlds.

Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present.

Today is a king in disguise.

Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters.

Let us leave hurry to slaves.

The wings of Time are black and white, Pied with morning and with night.

All substances the cunning chemist Time Melts down into that liquor of my life.

These times of ours are series and full of calamity, but all times are essentially alike. As soon as there is life there is danger.

The roses under my window make no reference to former roses or better ones; they are what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.

Speak your latent conviction. . . Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.

To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same fields, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.

Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.