Quotes & anectdotes from
the wise,
the foolish,
the courageous &
the drunk

Ralph Waldo Emerson Philosopher

  • Gender: Male
  • Citizenship: United States
  • Born: May 25, 1803
  • Died: Apr 27, 1882

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.

Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature. Following this ground-breaking work, he gave a speech entitled "The American Scholar" in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. considered to be America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence".

Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first, then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays – Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series, published respectively in 1841 and 1844 – represent the core of his thinking, and include such well-known essays as Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet and Experience.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.

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

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Trust men and they will be true to you treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.

The years teach much which the days never know.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.

Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

The faith that stands on authority is not faith.

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

Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

Nature hates calculators.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.

We acquire the strength we have overcome.

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

A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.

Men are what their mothers made them.

In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.

There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

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

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.

The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt but so are lies.

Beauty without expression is boring.

People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.

In the morning a man walks with his whole body in the evening, only with his legs.

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.

Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.

Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.

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

The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

All mankind love a lover.

Earth laughs in flowers.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

Money often costs too much.

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

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

The highest revelation is that God is in every man.

I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.

All diseases run into one, old age.

Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.

Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.

Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

A great man is always willing to be little.

Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.

Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

Beauty is an outward gift, which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

With the past, I have nothing to do nor with the future. I live now.

Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.

We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more.

Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.

The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

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

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

We see God face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Our best thoughts come from others.

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.

We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

Power and speed be hands and feet.

He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.

A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

Nothing external to you has any power over you.

A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.

Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.

God screens us evermore from premature ideas.

Our faith comes in moments our vice is habitual.

A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

God enters by a private door into every individual.

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force - that thoughts rule the world.

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

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.

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

As soon as there is life there is danger.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.

The first wealth is health.

Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.