Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one's own sunshine. — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next. — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail? — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
Circumstance does not make the man. Circumstance reveals man to himself. — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
Every man is a borrower and a mimic, life is theatrical and literature a quotation. — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
“The great-eyed Plato proportioned the lights and shades after the genius of our life.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
Life is wasted in the necessary preparation of finding what is the true way, and we die just as we enter it. — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know. — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life. — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision, his living is natural and poetic. — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times,… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
I find nothing in fables more astonishing than my experience in every hour. One moment of a man's life is a fact… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
The most active lives have so much routine as to preclude progress almost equally with the most inactive. — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
The sexton, tolling his bell at noon, Deems not that great Napoleon Stops his horse, and lists withdelight, Whilst his files sweep… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
Let the realist not mind appearances. Let him delegate to others the costly courtesies and decorations of social life. The virtuesare economists,… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
Life is girt all round with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished to add their point of… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
The worthless and offensive members of society, whose existence is a social pest, invariably think themselves the most ill-used people alive, and… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
Every man has a choice between love of truth and love of repose. Love of repose brings him a solid reputation and… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
If we suddenly plant our foot, and say, - I will neither eat nor drink nor wear nor touch any food or… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
All life is an experiment. Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
Prayer that craves a particular commodity—anything less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
For all our penny-wisdom, for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all men have sublime… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
Our culture, therefore, must not omit the arming of the man. Let him hear in season, that he is born into the… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
“Whilst I adore this ineffable life which is at my heart, it will not condescend to gossip with me, it will not… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
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… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
Law rules throughout existence, a Law which is not intelligent, but Intelligence. — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
The multitude of the sick shall not make us deny the existence of health. — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
It is not the irregular hours or irregular diet that makes the romantic life. — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions. — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
If we will not interfere with our thought, but will act entirely, or see how the thing stands in God, we know the particular… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will or against his will he draws his portrait to the eye of his… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
Consideration is the soil in which wisdom may be expected to grow, and strength be given to every up-springing plant of duty. — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
“There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
Another success is the post-office, with its educating energy augmented by cheapness and guarded by a certain religious sentimentin mankind; so that the power… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
A child reminds us that playtime is an essential part of our daily routine. — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
No man can be criticised but by a greater than he. Do not, then, read the reviews. — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
Coal lay in ledges under the ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the surface. We may… — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
