Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed, there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennui s, vanish, all duties even.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

To be great is to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

What I must do is all that concerns me. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Self-sacrifice is the real miracle out of which all the reported miracles grow.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with celestial air, until it eclipses the sun and moon.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Who can guess how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes?
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

All that I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The thirst for adventure is the vent which Destiny offers; a war, a crusade, a gold mine, a new country, speak to the imagination and offer swing and play to the confined powers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Courtesy Life be not so short but that there is always time for courtesy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some of your grief you have cured, and lived to survive; but what torments of pain have you endured that haven't as yet arrived.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only sin that we never forgive in each other is a difference in opinion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Always do what you are afraid to do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman -- repose in energy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is short, but there is always time for courtesy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man's style is his mind's voice. Wooden minds, wooden voices.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

A great man stands on God. A small man on a great man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; for causes which are unpenetrated.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Religion is as effectually destroyed by bigotry as by indifference.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men are respectable only as they respect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion?
Ralph Waldo Emerson

'Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

So of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more it remains.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.
Ralph Waldo Emerson