The thirst for adventure is the vent which Destiny offers; a war, a crusade, a gold mine, a new country, speak to the imagination and offer swing and play to the confined powers.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, The Natural History of Intellect
When you have worn out your shoes, the strength of the shoe leather has passed into the fiber of your body. I measure your health by the number of shoes and hats and clothes you have worn out.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, attributed, Walk to Win
Give me wine to wash me clean
Of the weather-stains of cares.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "From the Persian of Hafiz", Poems
The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Nature
The god of Victory is said to be one-handed, but Peace gives victory to both sides.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Journals
Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Letters and Social Aims
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Essays
Science corrects the old creeds, sweeps away, with every new perception, our infantile catechisms, and necessitates a faith commensurate with the grander orbits and universal laws which it discloses.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Address read before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, July 18, 1867
The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion; the mind that grows could not predict the time, the means, the mode of that spontaneity; God enters by a private door into every individual.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Intellect", Essays
The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Conduct of Life
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, The Snow-Storm
If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Nature and Selected Essays
Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Literary Ethics
The secrets of life are not shown except to sympathy and likeness.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Representative Men
The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, lecture delivered at the Masonic Temple in Boston, Massachusetts, December 9, 1841
The saint and poet seek privacy to ends the most public and universal: and it is the secret of culture, to interest the man more in his public, than in his private quality.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Culture", The Conduct of Life
The thing done avails, and not what is said about it. An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "First Visit to England", English Traits
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Emerson in His Journals
Money, which represents the prose of life, and is hardly spoken of in parlors without apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Nominalist and Realist", Essays
No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by necessity, which by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, The Conduct of Life
Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Self-Reliance
Money often costs too much.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, The Conduct of Life
In this kingdom of illusions we grope eagerly for stays and foundations.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Illusions", The Conduct of Life
Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated, they fascinate.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Illusions", The Conduct of Life
There is illusion that shall deceive even the performer of the miracle.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Illusions", The Conduct of Life
The characteristic of a genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Heroism", Essays
Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right; and although a different breeding, different religion, and greater intellectual activity, would have modified or even reversed the particular action, yet for the hero, that thing he does is the highest deed, and is not open to the censure of philosophers or divines. It is the avowal of the unschooled man, that he finds a quality in him that is negligent of expense, of health, of life, of danger, of hatred, of reproach, and knows that his will is higher and more excellent than all actual and all possible antagonists.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Heroism", Essays
The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely, and to sleep warm. The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and can very well abide its loss.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Heroism", Essays
The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but pleasantly, and, as it were, merrily, he advances to his own music, alike in frightful alarms, and in the tipsy mirth of universal dissoluteness. There is somewhat not philosophical in heroism; there is somewhat not holy in it; it seems not to know that other souls are of one texture with it; it has pride; it is the extreme of individual nature. Nevertheless, we must profoundly revere it.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Heroism", Essays
Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is the state of the soul at war, and its ultimate objects are the last defiance of falsehood and wrong, and the power to bear all that can be inflicted by evil agents. It speaks the truth, and it is just, generous, hospitable, temperate, scornful of petty calculations, and scornful of being scorned. It persists; it is of an undaunted boldness, and of a fortitude not to be wearied out.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Heroism", Essays
Whoso is heroic will always find crises to try his edge. Human virtue demands her champions and martyrs, and the trial of persecution always proceeds.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Heroism", Essays
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, attributed, Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing
Those who are capable of humility, of justice, of love, of aspiration, stand already on a platform that commands the sciences and arts, speech and poetry, action and grace. For whoso dwells in this moral beatitude already anticipates those special powers which men prize so highly.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "The Over-Soul", Essays
My garden is a forest ledge
Which older forests bound;
The banks slope down to the blue lake-edge,
Then plunge to depths profound!
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, My Garden
For the world was built in order
And the atoms march in tune;
Rhyme the pipe, and Time the warder,
The sun obeys them, and the moon.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Monadnock
For the expectation of gratitude is mean, and is continually punished by the total insensibility of the obliged person. It is a great happiness to get off without injury and heart-burning from one who has had the ill-luck to be served by you. It is a very onerous business, this of being served, and the debtor naturally wishes to give you a slap.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Gifts", Essays
Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library; a company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning.
