Top 100 Quotes About Life Ralph Waldo Emerson
#1. He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life. Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Lorenz Font
#2. Let others be afraid, but the soul is not afraid of anything. It lives according to its own laws. It is bigger than space and older than time. It gives courage against all the misfortunes of life. - RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Leo Tolstoy
#3. In the country, without any interference from the law, the agricultural life favors the permanence of families.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#4. But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#5. Measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you. Warren Buffet
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#6. Men of sense esteem wealth to be the assimilation of nature to themselves, the converting of the sap and juices of the planet to the incarnation and nutriment of their design.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#7. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#8. Venus, when her son was lost,
Cried him up and down the coast,
In hamlets, palaces, and parks,
And told the truant by his marks,-
Golden curls, and quiver, and bow.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#9. The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it ... we see literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from within the field.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#10. The poor and the low have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as well as you. "Blessed be nothing," and "The worse things are, the better they are," are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of common life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#11. The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#12. Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find, without question.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#13. In order for one to learn the important lessons of life, one must first overcome a fear each day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#14. If in the least particular, one could derange the order of nature, who would accept the gift of life?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#16. Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#17. A man cannot utter two or three sentences without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life and thought, whether in the kingdom of the senses and the understanding, or in that of ideas and imagination, or in the realm of intuitions and duty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#18. If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as "spiritual life," "God," "soul," "cross," etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#19. The household is a school of power. There, within the door, learn the tragi-comedy of human life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#20. Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#21. Same spirit which gave it forth, - is the fundamental law of criticism. A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text. By degrees
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#22. The true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life,
life passed through the fire of thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#23. The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#24. Life must be lived on a higher plane. We must go up to a higher platform, to which we are always invited to ascend; there, the whole aspect of things changes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#25. The genius of life is friendly to the noble, and, in the dark, brings them friends from far.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#26. What is the end of human life? It is not, believe me, the chief end of man that he should make a fortune and beget children whose end is likewise to make a fortune, but it is, in few words, that he should explore himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#28. Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#29. Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue ...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#30. Preaching is the expression of moral sentiments applied to the duties of life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#31. Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and sotheir house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#32. Let not the tie be mercenary, though the service is measured in money. Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#34. The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#35. Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar's dinner, from a hundred charities?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#36. The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but for the deliverance from fear. It is the storm within that endangers him, not the storm without.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#37. The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life,in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#38. Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#39. The Church seems to totter to its fall, almost all life extinct. On this occasion, any complaisance would be criminal which told you, whose hope and commission it is to preach the faith of Christ, that the faith of Christ is preached.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#40. Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#43. Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point, and, whilst they remain in contact, all other points of each of the spheres are inert; their turn must also come, and the longer a particular union lasts, the more energy of appetency the parts not in union acquire.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#44. What art can paint or gild any object in after life with the glow which nature gives to the first baubles of childhood? St. Peter's cannot have the magical power over us that the red and gold covers of our first picture-book possessed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#45. Life is very narrow. Bring any club or company of intelligent men together again after ten years, and if the presence of some penetrating and calming genius could dispose them to frankness, what a confession of insanities would come up!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#47. We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn ahundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#48. Our chief want in life, is,
someone who shall make us do what we can.
This is the service of a friend.
With him we are easily great.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#50. The great-eyed Plato proportioned the lights and shades after the genius of our life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#51. Every man has a choice between love of truth and love of repose. Love of repose brings him a solid reputation and peaceful life; love of truth keeps him in suspense. A man who loves truth respects the highest law of his being.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#53. Come out of the azure. Love the day. Do not leave the sky out of your landscape.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#54. The most useful man in the most useful world, so long as only commodity was served, would remain unsatisfied. But, as fast as he sees beauty, life acquires a very high value.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#56. No mountain is of any appreciable height to break the curve of the sphere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#58. [A]s if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand ...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#59. The pleasure of life is according to the man that lives it, and not according to the work or place.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#60. We ask for long life, but 'tis deep life, or noble moments that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#62. The South-wind brings Life, sunshine and desire, And on every mount and meadow Breathes aromatic fire; But over the dead he has no power, The lost, the lost, he cannot restore; And, looking over the hills, I mourn The darling who shall not return.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#64. It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no person can sincerely try to help another without helping him or herself. Serve and you shall be served. If you love and serve people, you cannot, by any hiding or stratagem, escape the remuneration.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#66. Self-love is, in almost all men, such an over-weight that they are incredulous of a man's habitual preference of the general good to his own; but when they see it proved by sacrifices of ease, wealth, rank, and of life itself, there is no limit to their admiration.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#67. I will no longer confer, differ, refer, defer, prefer, or suffer. I renounce the whole tribe of fero. I embrace absolute life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#68. To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived - that is to have succeeded
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#69. Life is a boundless privilege, and when you pay for your ticket, and get into the car, you have no guess what good company you shall find there.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#70. The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#71. Alas for the unhappy man that is called to stand in the pulpit, and not give the bread of life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#72. As men get on in life, they acquire a love for sincerity, and somewhat less solicitude to be lulled or amused. In the progress ofthe character, there is an increasing faith in the moral sentiment, and a decreasing faith in propositions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#73. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant. Now we reckon them as bank-days, by some debt which is to be paid us, or which we are to pay, or some pleasure we are to taste.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#74. The work of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark and leaf-buds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#75. In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#76. But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#77. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says,
he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#79. I find a provision in the constitution of the world for the writer or secretary, who is to report the doings of the miraculous spirit of life that everywhere throbs and works.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#82. Man begins life helpless. The babe is in paroxysms of fear the moment its nurse leaves it alone, and it comes so slowly to any power of self-protection that mothers say the salvation of the life and health of a young child is a perpetual miracle.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#83. When you were born you were crying and everyone else was smiling. Live your life so at the end, your're the one who is smiling and everyone else is crying.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#84. Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness,
these are the threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#85. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions, that around us arerushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#86. Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is due to the triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#88. For the secrets of life are not shown except to sympathy and likeness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#89. There is no event greater in life than the appearance of new persons about our hearth, except it be the progress of the characterwhich draws them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#90. Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#93. Every man beholds his human condition with a degree of melancholy. As a ship aground is battered by the waves, so man, imprisonedin mortal life, lies open to the mercy of coming events.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#95. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#98. A day for toil, an hour for sport, but for a friend is life too short.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#99. I find nothing in fables more astonishing than my experience in every hour. One moment of a man's life is a fact so stupendous as to take the luster out of fiction.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#100. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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