I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.
Category: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday.
Who you are speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say.
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day.
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.
A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.
The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.
A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.
The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him.
The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows.
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.
But hospitality must be for service, and not for show, or it pulls down the host. The brave soul rates itself too high to value itself by the splendor of its table and draperies. It gives what it hath, and all it hath, but its own majesty can lend a better grace to bannocks and fair water than belong to city feasts.
If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.
Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.
We do what we must, and call it by the best names.
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
Imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man.
We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.