Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Quotes

• A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat; self-control is the rule.

• The faith that stand on authority is not faith.

• We are born believing. A man bears beliefs, as a tree bears apples.

• If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

• There is nothing capricious in nature and the implanting of a desire indicates that its gratification is in the constitution of the creature that feel it.

• 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

• Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the triumph of some enthusiasm.

• Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.

• If a man knows the law, find out, though he live in a pine shanty, and resort to him. And if a man can pipe or sing, so as to wrap the imprisoned soul in an elysium; or can paint a landscape, and convey into souls and ochres all the enchantments of Spring or Autumn; or can liberate and intoxicate all people who hear him with delicious songs and verses; it is certain that the secret cannot be kept; the first witness tells it to a second, and men go by fives and tens and fifties to his doors.

• Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.

• Who so would be a man, must be a nonconformist.

• You must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.

• A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

• The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatest, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art.

• Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.

• No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

• The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.

• Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass.

• Happiness is a perfume which you cannot pour on someone without getting some on yourself.

• What a searching preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon of health.