Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.

My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

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

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.

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

A friend may be natures most magnificent creation.

Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.

A mans growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope and eloquence in all whom she approaches.

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore it if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

He is a dull observer whose experience has not taught him the reality and force of magic, as well as of chemistry.

Misunderstood! It is a right fools word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

Traveling is a fools paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things

The ancestor of every action is a thought.