Quotes By Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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.

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.

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.'

A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.

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

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

Earth laughs in flowers.

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

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

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.

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

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.

America is another name for opportunity.