Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
“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.”
“Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.”
“Every artist was first an amateur.”
“It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourself.”
“If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and adore.”
“Tis the good reader that makes the good book.”
“To a dull mind all of nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.”
“When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.”
“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.”
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
“Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.”
“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
“Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.”
“Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.”
“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide...”
“Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.”
“I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.”
“Life is a journey, not a destination.”
“What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.”