Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

Thought is the property of those only who can entertain it. -

The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when all your arrows are spent.

You would compliment a coxcomb doing a good act, but you would not praise an angel.

It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then is he caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals.

Speak your latent conviction. . . Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

Marriage is the perfection of what love aimed at, ignorant of what it sought.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole lifes cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.

A man is known by the books he reads.

Imitation cannot go above its model.

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another mans.

Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those most sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.

Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it today because it is not of today.

As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain sublime assurance of success, but as soon as honied words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.

there is no planet, sun, or star could hold you if you but knew what you are.

The finest people marry the two sexes in their own person.

Virtues are in the popular estimate rather the exception than the rule.

None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They think society is wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world.