Top 500 Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “The best of life is conversation, and the greatest success is confidence, or perfect understanding between sincere people.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

352. “Let a stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

353. “The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

354. “No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

355. “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.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

356. “When I read a good book, I wish my life were three thousand years long.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

357. “All successful men have agreed in one thing – they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

358. “The difference between talent and genius is in the direction of the current: in genius, it is from within outward; in talent from without inward.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

359. “Postpone not your life.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

360. “As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

361. “Be not the slave of your own past.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

362. “I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hopethat it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

363. “Do what we can, summer will have its flies.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

364. “When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

365. “First be a good animal.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

366. “And, in fine, the ancient precept, “Know thyself,” and the modern precept, “Study nature,” become at last one maxim.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

367. “Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as two sides of an algebraic equation.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

368. “Hospitality consists in a little fire, a little food, and an immense quiet.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

369. “The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

370. “The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

371. “There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

372. “I wiped away the weeds and foam, I fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore, With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

373. “I wish to say what I think and feel today, with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

374. “The whole of what we know is a system of compensation. Every defect in one manner is made up in another. Every suffering is rewarded; every sacrifice is made up; every debt is paid.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

375. “Every man’s nature is a sufficient advertisement to him of the character of his fellows.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

376. “Love is our highest word and the synonym for God.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

377. “Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

378. “The height of the pinnacle is determined by the breadth of the base.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

379. “Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

380. “We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend, so we buy ice cream.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

381. “There is creative reading as well as creative writing.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

382. “The crime which bankrupts men and nations is that of turning aside from one’s main purpose to serve a job here and there.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

383. “The greatest delight 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.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

384. “Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

385. “Every man is the inlet and may become the outlet of all there is in God.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

387. “The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

388. “Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

389. “Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

390. “Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

391. “Every mind is different; and the more it is unfolded, the more pronounced is that difference.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

392. “Some of your griefs you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived, But what torments of grief you’ve endured From evils that never arrived.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

393. “Doing well is the result of doing good. That’s what capitalism is all about.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

394. “Rhodora! If the sages ask thee why This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

395. “Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world; and beyond its world a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you: build, therefore, your own world.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

396. “Build therefore your own world.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

397. “Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

398. “Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

399. “Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

400. “There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson