Quotes By Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.'

Earth laughs in flowers.

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

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

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

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

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

America is another name for opportunity.

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

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else.

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

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.

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

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

Money often costs too much.

Children are all foreigners.

Every burned book enlightens the world.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.