Quotes By Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

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

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

Give a boy address and accomplishments and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

The earth laughs in flowers.

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

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

All diseases run into one, old age.

Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.

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

There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.

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

We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.

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

Getting old is a fascination thing. The older you get, the older you want to get.

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.

In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.

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

Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.

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

When we quarrel, how we wish we had been blameless.

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

Revolutions go not backward.

It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 'always do what you are afraid to do.'

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

Earth laughs in flowers.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

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