Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do the thing, and you shall have the power; but they who do not do the thing have not the power.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have yet to be discovered.

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, honorable, compassionate.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.

You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.

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.

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is.

What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

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. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.

The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.

The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself.

I like a church, I like a cowl, I love a prophet of the soul, And on my heart monastic aisles Fall like sweet strains or pensive smiles; Yet not for all his faith can see, Would I that cowled churchman be. Why should the vest on him allure, Which I could not on me endure?

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good.

Character is higher than intellect...A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Life is a journey, not a destination.

Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as 'glittering generalities,' have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

I wiped away the weeds and foam, And fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness.

Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face.

I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.

Life is too short to waste The critic bite or cynic bark, Quarrel, or reprimand; ’Twill soon be dark; Up! mind thine own aim, and God speed the mark!

You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear, that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. "What is this Truth you seek? What is this Beauty?" men will ask, with derision. If, nevertheless, God have called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say, "As others do, so will I. I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of the land, and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season." — then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men. The hour of that choice is the crisis of your history; and see that you hold yourself fast by the intellect. ... Bend to the persuasion which is flowing to you from every object in Nature, to be its tongue to the heart of man, and to show the besotted world how passing fair is wisdom.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men — that is genius.

These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural fact as a picture.

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, for 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 to him to till.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire.

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whisper of the gods.

For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else; and for every thing you gain, you lose something. The dice of God are always loaded. The world looks like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself.

Men are what their mothers made them.

Insist on yourself; never imitate.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

A man contains all that is needful to his government within himself. He is made a law unto himself. All real good or evil that can befal [sic] him must be from himself. He only can do himself any good or any harm. Nothing can be given to him or can taken from him but always there is a compensation.. There is a correspondence between the human soul and everything that exists in the world; more properly, everything that is known to man. Instead of studying things without the principles of them, all may be penetrated unto with him. Every act puts the agent in a new position. The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself. He is not to live the future as described to him but to live the real future to the real present. The highest revelation is that God is in every man.

Give all to love; Obey thy heart; Friends, kindred, days, Estate, good fame, Plans, credit, and the muse; Nothing refuse.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life — no disgrace, no calamity — which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes.