Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Quotes

• Whoever is open, loyal, true; of humane and affable demeanour; honourable himself, and in his judgement of others; faithful to his word as to law, and faithful alike to God and man....such a man is a true gentleman.

• Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

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

• Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

• The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the ordinary.

• The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.

• As soon as there is life there is danger.

• It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion. It is easy in solitude to live after our own. But the great man is he who, in the midst of the crowd, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

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

• He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

• We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.

• The true test of a civilization is not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops—no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

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

• If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being.

• Insist on yourself; never imitate... Every great man is unique.

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

• The only gift is a portion of thyself.

• I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

• As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.

• We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.