Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.”

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

“We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.”

“The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity.”

“Hitch your wagon to a star.”

“Knowledge is the antidote to fear.”

“Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.”

“The only way to have a friend is to be one.”

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”

“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.”

“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”

“To be great is to be misunderstood.”

“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”

“Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”

“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”

“A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.”

“A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best”

“Nor knowest thou what argument Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent. All are needed by each one; Nothing is fair or good alone.”

“If eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.”

“Go put your creed into your deed, Nor speak with double tongue.”

“Whoever fights, whoever falls, Justice conquers evermore.”

“For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?”

“Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.”

“A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.”

“Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.”

“Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.”

“Every action is measured by the depth of the sentiment from which it proceeds.”

“He is great who is what he is from Nature, and who never reminds us of others.”

“Thought is the property of him who can entertain it, and of him who can adequately place it.”

“A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence.”

“Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.”

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

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

“By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.”

“Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.”

“In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.”

“Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force; that thoughts rule the world.”

“So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can!”

“Self-trust is the essence of heroism.”

“Do the thing, and you shall have the power:”

“Have the courage not to adopt another’s courage. There is scope and cause and resistance enough for us in our proper work and circumstance.”

“A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.”

“We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken.”

“I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults over the moon.”

“Hast thou named all the birds without a gun? Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk? At rich men's tables eaten bread and pulse? Unarmed, faced danger with a heart of trust? And loved so well a high behavior, In man or maid, that thou from speech refrained, Nobility more nobly to repay? O, be my friend, and teach me to be thine!”

“The South-wind brings Life, sunshine, and desire, And on every mount and meadow Breathes aromatic fire; But over the dead he has no power, The lost, the lost, he cannot restore; And, looking over the hills, I mourn The darling who shall not return.”

“The sense of the world is short,— Long and various the report,— To love and be beloved; Men and gods have not outlearned it; And, how oft soe'er they've turned it, 'Tis not to be improved.”

“Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty.”

“Every act rewards itself, or, in other words, integrates itself, in a twofold manner; first, in the thing, or in real nature; and secondly, in the circumstance, or in apparent nature.”

“As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain assurance of success.”

“The nature and soul of things takes on itself the guaranty of the fulfillment of every contract, so that honest service cannot come to loss.”

“In a virtuous action, I properly am ; in a virtuous act, I add to the world; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing, and see the darkness receding on the limits of the horizon.”

“Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design;—and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients.”

“I must feel pride in my friend's accomplishments as if they were mine, and a property in his virtues.”

“He proposes himself for contest where Time, Want, Danger are in the lists, and he alone is victor who has truth enough in his constitution to preserve the delicacy of his beauty from the wear and tear of all these.”

“The only reward of virtue, is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.”

“The secret of success in society, is a certain heartiness and sympathy.”

“Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary; a round and final success nowhere.”

“Cultivated men always feel and speak so as if a great fortune, the achievement of a civil or social measure, great personal influence, a graceful and commanding address, had their value as proofs of the energy of the spirit.”

“The application of means to ends ensures victory and the songs of victory not less in a farm or a shop than in the tactics of party or of war.”

“I no longer poorly compute my possible achievement by what remains to me of the month or the year; for these moments confer a sort of omnipresence and omnipotence which asks nothing of duration, but sees that the energy of the mind is commensurate with the work to be done, without time.”

“When we see the conqueror we do not think much of any one battle or success.”

“People say sometimes, "See what I have overcome; see how cheerful I am; see how completely I have triumphed over these black events." Not if they still remind me of the black event,—they have not yet conquered.”

“As no man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance with the hindrances or talents of men, until he has suffered from the one, and seen the triumph of the other over his own want of the same.”

“When he is punished, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts; learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation and real skill.”

“By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little you gain the great.”

“The silent heart encourages her; O friend, never strike sail to a fear!”

“The human body is the magazine of inventions, the patent-office, where are the models from which every hint was taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses.”

“Invention breeds invention.”

“Machinery is aggressive. The weaver becomes a web, the machinist a machine. If you do not use the tools, they use you.”

“The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody.”

“But the public values the invention more than the inventor does. The inventor knows there is much more and better where this came from.”

“Malthus, when he stated that the mouths went on multiplying geometrically, and the food only arithmetically, forgot to say that the human mind was also a factor in political economy, and that the augmenting wants of society would be met by an augmenting power of invention.”

“Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences avail to keep a fact a fact.”

“Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away,—means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour.”

“We do not believe there is any force in to-day to rival or recreate that beautiful yesterday. We linger in the ruins of the old tent where once we had bread and shelter and organs, nor believe that the spirit can feed, cover, and nerve us again.”

“The influence of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to that degree that the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul.”

“With each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires and expires its air.”

“The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence.”

“Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.”

“The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.”

“The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food.”

“The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown.”

“For, nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.”

“To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself.”

“The inhabitants of cities suppose that the country landscape is pleasant only half the year. I please myself with the graces of the winter scenery, and believe that we are as much touched by it as by the genial influences of summer.”

“A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text.”

“A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.”

“Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?”

“Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul.”

“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!”

“The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.”

“The misery of man appears like childish petulance, when we explore the steady and prodigal provision that has been made for his support and delight on this green ball which floats him through the heavens.”

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

“Time is, indeed, the theatre and seat of illusion: nothing is so ductile and elastic.”

“The mind stretches an hour to a century, and dwarfs an age to an hour.”

“If, on a winter day, you should stand within a bell-glass, the face and color of the afternoon clouds would not indicate whether it were June or January; and if we did not find the reflection of ourselves in the eyes of the young people, we could not know that the century-clock had struck seventy instead of twenty.”

“Life and art are cumulative; and he who has accomplished something in any department alone deserves to be heard on that subject.”

“Skill to do comes of doing; knowledge comes by eyes always open, and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power.”

“I count it another capital advantage of age, this, that a success more or less signifies nothing.”

“He is serene who does not feel himself pinched and wronged, but whose condition, in particular and in general, allows the utterance of his mind.”

“In a world so charged and sparkling with power, a man does not live long and actively without costly additions of experience, which, though not spoken, are recorded in his mind.”

“For a fourth benefit, age sets its house in order, and finishes its works, which to every artist is a supreme pleasure.”

“Our instincts drove us to hive innumerable experiences, that are yet of no visible value, and which we may keep for twice seven years before they shall be wanted.”

“The instinct of classifying marks the wise and healthy mind.”

“An old scholar finds keen delight in verifying the impressive anecdotes and citations he has met with in miscellaneous reading and hearing, in all the years of youth.”

“Time, yes, that is the finder, the unweariable explorer, not subject to casualties, omniscient at last.”

“The day comes when the hidden author of our story is found; when the brave speech returns straight to the hero who said it; when the admirable verse finds the poet to whom it belongs; and best of all, when the lonely thought, which seemed so wise, yet half-wise, half-thought, because it cast no light abroad, is suddenly matched in our mind by its twin, by its sequence, or next related analogy, which gives it instantly radiating power, and justifies the superstitious instinct with which we have hoarded it.”

“But the central wisdom, which was old in infancy, is young in fourscore years, and, dropping off obstructions, leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise.”

“Barring all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether.”

“How many persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor, and who honor us!”

“How many we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom, though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with!”

“The scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not furnish him with one good thought or happy expression; but it is necessary to write a letter to a friend, and, forthwith, troops of gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words.”

“The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed; there is no winter, and no night; all tragedies, all ennuis vanish; all duties even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved persons.”

“Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.”

“I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.”

“I chide society, I embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate.”

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

“Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.”

“It is not that the soul puts forth friends, as the tree puts forth leaves, and presently, by the germination of new buds, extrudes the old leaf?”

“The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone, for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.”

“The instinct of affection revives the hope of union with our mates, and the returning sense of insulation recalls us from the chase.”

“Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fiber of the human heart.”

“The laws of friendship are great, austere, and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals.”

“All association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other.”

“I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know.”

“But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me.”

“When a man becomes dear to me, I have touched the goal of fortune.”

“The end of friendship is a commerce the most strict and homely that can be joined; more strict than any of which we have experience. It is for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and death. It is fit for serene days, and graceful gifts, and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty, and persecution.”

“We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and offices of man's life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom and unity.”

“But I find this law of one to one, peremptory for conversation, which is the practice and consummation of friendship.”

“In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone.”

“In good company, the individuals at once merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present.”

“No two men but being left alone with each other, enter into simpler relations.”

“Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness, that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other party.”

“The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it.”

“Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal, and great as nature itself?”

“Respect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as not to prejudice its perfect flower by your impatience for its opening.”

“There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutual respect until, in their dialogue, each stands for the whole world.”

“What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what grandeur of spirit we can.”

“Men have sometimes exchanged names with their friends, as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul.”

“The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood.”

“But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which can love us, and which we can love.”

“It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too spiritual, as if so we could lose any genuine love.”

“Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own.”

“It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other.”

“The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust.”

“Disinterestedness, as shown in indifference to the ordinary bribes and influences of conduct,—a purpose so sincere and generous that it cannot be tempted aside by any prospects of wealth or other private advantage.”

“Self-love is, in almost all men, such an overweight, that they are incredulous of a man’s habitual preference of the general good to his own; but when they see it proved by sacrifices of ease, wealth, rank, and of life itself, there is no limit to their admiration.”

“Self-sacrifice is the real miracle out of which all the reported miracles grew.”

“The third excellence is courage, the perfect will, which no terrors can shake, which is attracted by frowns or threats or hostile armies, nay, needs these to awake and fan its reserved energies into a pure flame, and is never quite itself until the hazard is extreme; then it is serene and fertile, and all its powers play well.”

“Animal resistance, the instinct of the male animal when cornered, is no doubt common; but the pure article, courage with eyes, courage with conduct, self-possession at the cannon’s mouth, cheerfulness in lonely adherence to the right, is the endowment of elevated characters.”

“And any man who puts his life in peril in a cause which is esteemed becomes the darling of all men.”

“How short a time since this whole nation rose every morning to read or to hear the traits of courage of its sons and brothers in the field, and was never weary of the theme!”

“We have had examples of men who, for showing effective courage on a single occasion, have become a favorite spectacle to nations, and must be brought in chariots to every mass meeting.”

“Men are so charmed with valor, that they have pleased themselves with being called lions, leopards, eagles, and dragons, from the animals contemporary with us in the geologic formations.”

“Every moment, as long as he is awake, he studies the use of his eyes, ears, hands, and feet, learning how to meet and avoid his dangers, and thus every hour loses one terror more.”

“The political reigns of terror have been reigns of madness and malignity,—a total perversion of opinion; society is upside down, and its best men are thought too bad to live.”

“What cannot stand must fall; and the measure of our sincerity, and therefore of the respect of men, is the amount of health and wealth we will hazard in the defence of our right.”

“I am much mistaken if every man who went to the army in the late war had not a lively curiosity to know how he should behave in action.”

“Each surmounts the fear as fast as he precisely understands the peril, and learns the means of resistance.”

“Each is liable to panic, which is, exactly, the terror of ignorance surrendered to the imagination.”

“Knowledge is the encourager, knowledge that takes fear out of the heart, knowledge and use, which is knowledge in practice.”

“It is he who has done the deed once who does not shrink from attempting it again.”

“It is the groom who knows the jumping horse well who can safely ride him.”

“Use makes a better soldier than the most urgent considerations of duty,—familiarity with danger enabling him to estimate the danger.”

“The sailor loses fear as fast as he acquires command of sails and spars and steam; the frontiersman, when he has a perfect rifle and has acquired a sure aim.”

“To the sailor’s experience every new circumstance suggests what he must do.”

“The terrific chances which make the hours and the minutes long to the passenger, he whiles away by incessant application of expedients and repairs.”

“To him a leak, a hurricane, or a water-spout is so much work—no more.”

“The hunter is not alarmed by bears, catamounts, or wolves, nor the grazier by his bull, nor the dog-breeder by his bloodhound, nor an Arab by the simoom, nor a farmer by a fire in the woods.”

“The school-boy is daunted before his tutor by a question of arithmetic, because he does not yet command the simple steps of the solution which the boy beside him has mastered.”

“These once seen, he is as cool as Archimedes, and cheerily proceeds a step farther.”

“Courage is equality to the problem, in affairs, in science, in trade, in council, or in action; consists in the conviction that the agents with whom you contend are not superior in strength or resources or spirit to you.”

“The general must stimulate the mind of his soldiers to the perception that they are men, and the enemy is no more.”

“It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.”

“The thoughtful man says, you differ from me in opinion and methods; but do you not see that I cannot think or act otherwise than I do? that my way of living is organic?”

“Undoubtedly there is a temperamental courage, a warlike blood, which loves a fight, does not feel itself except in a quarrel, as one sees in wasps, or ants, or cocks, or cats.”

“There is a courage of the cabinet as well as a courage of the field; a courage of manners in private assemblies, and another in public assemblies; a courage which enables one man to speak masterly to a hostile company, whilst another man who can easily face a cannon’s mouth dares not open his own.”

“There is a courage of a merchant in dealing with his trade, by which dangerous turns of affairs are met and prevailed over.”

“Merchants recognize as much gallantry, well judged too, in the conduct of a wise and upright man of business, in difficult times, as soldiers in a soldier.”

“There is a courage in the treatment of every art by a master in architecture, in sculpture, in painting, or in poetry, each cheering the mind of the spectator or receiver as by true strokes of genius, which yet nowise implies the presence of physical valor in the artist.”

“A certain quantity of power belongs to a certain quantity of faculty.”

“The singers, I observe, all yield to it, and so the fair singer indulges her instinct, and dares, and dares, because she knows she can.”

“The judge puts his mind to the tangle of contradictions in the case, squarely accosts the question, and, by not being afraid of it, by dealing with it as business which must be disposed of, he sees presently that common arithmetic and common methods apply to this affair.”

“Perseverance strips it of all peculiarity, and ranges it on the same ground as other business.”

“Morphy played a daring game in chess: the daring was only an illusion of the spectator, for the player sees his move to be well fortified and safe.”

“In all applications ’tis the same power,—the habit of reference to one’s own mind, as the home of all truth and counsel, and which can easily dispose of any book because it can very well do without all books.”

“Every creature has a courage of his constitution fit for his duties:—Archimedes, the courage of a geometer to stick to his diagram, heedless of the siege and sack of the city; and the Roman soldier his faculty to strike at Archimedes.”

“Each is strong, relying on his own, and each is betrayed when he seeks in himself the courage of others.”

“True courage is not ostentatious; men who wish to inspire terror seem thereby to confess themselves cowards.”

“Why do they rely on it, but because they know how potent it is with themselves?”

“The charm of the best courages is that they are inventions, inspirations, flashes of genius.”

“The hero could not have done the feat at another hour, in a lower mood.”

“The head is a half, a fraction, until it is enlarged and inspired by the moral sentiment.”

“For it is not the means on which we draw, as health or wealth, practical skill or dexterous talent, or multitudes of followers, that count, but the aims only.”

“There is a persuasion in the soul of man that he is here for cause, that he was put down in this place by the Creator to do the work for which he inspires him, that thus he is an overmatch for all antagonists that could combine against him.”

“For it is always new, leads and surprises, and practice never comes up with it.”

“He is everywhere a liberator, but of a freedom that is ideal; not seeking to have land or money or conveniences, but to have no other limitation than that which his own constitution imposes.”

“He wishes to break every yoke all over the world which hinders his brother from acting after his thought.”

“There are degrees of courage, and each step upward makes us acquainted with a higher virtue.”

“Let us say then frankly that the education of the will is the object of our existence.”

“He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.”

“I do not wish to put myself or any man into a theatrical position, or urge him to ape the courage of his comrade.”

“If you have no faith in beneficent power above you, but see only an adamantine fate coiling its folds about nature and man, then reflect that the best use of fate is to teach us courage, if only because baseness cannot change the appointed event.”

“If you accept your thoughts as inspirations from the Supreme Intelligence, obey them when they prescribe difficult duties, because they come only so long as they are used; or, if your scepticism reaches to the last verge, and you have no confidence in any foreign mind, then be brave, because there is one good opinion which must always be of consequence to you, namely, your own.”