Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson:

• • Speeches: "The American Scholar" (1837) - "Divinity School Address"  (1838) - "New England Reformers" (1844)

  • Poetry: "The Rhodora" (1834) - "Concord Hymn" (1836) - "Uriel" (1846) - "Brahman" (1856) - "Boston Hymn" (1863)

  • Essay Collections: 

    • Essays: First Series (1841) - I. History, II. Self-Reliance, III. Compensation, IV. Spiritual Laws, V. Love, VI. Friendship, VII. Prudence, VIII. Heroism, IX. The Over-Soul, X. Circles, XI. Intellect, XII. Art

    • Essays: Second Series (1844) - I. The Poet, II. Experience, III. Character, IV. Manners, V. Gifts, VI. Nature, VII. Politics, VIII. Nominalist and Realist, IX. New England Reformers

    • Nature; Addresses and Lectures (1849) - I. Introduction, II. Nature, III. Commodity, IV. Beauty, V. Language, VI. Discipline, VII. Idealism, VII. Spirit. VIII. Prospects

    • Representative Men (1850) - I. Uses of Great Men, II. Plato, III. Emanuel Swedenborg, IV. Michel de Montaigne, V. William Shakespeare, VI. Napoleon Bonaparte, VII. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

    • The Conduct of Life (1860) - I. Fate, II. Power, III. Wealth, IV. Culture, V. Behavior, VI. Worship, VII. Considerations by the Way, VIII. Beauty, IX. Illusions

    • Society and Solitude (1870) - I. Society and Solitude, II. Civilization, III. Art, IV. Eloquence, V. Domestic Life, VI. Farming, VII. Works and Days, VIII. Books, IX. Clubs, X. Courage, XI. Success, XII. Old Age

    • Letters and Social Aims (1876) - I. Poetry and Imagination, II. Social Aims, III. Eloquence, IV. Resources, V. The Comic, VI. Quotation and Originality, VII. Progress of Culture, VIII. Persian Poetry, IX. Inspiration, X. Greatness, XI. Immortality

Misattributed to Emerson

• • "A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.--No confirmed author. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/05/20/hero/

  • "A man is what he thinks about all day long"--No confirmed author.

  • "As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way."--No confirmed author.

  • "Beware of what you set your heart upon. For it surely shall be yours."--No confirmed author.

  • "Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true."--No confirmed author.

  • "Do not go where the path may lead, instead go where there is no path"--Muriel Strode, "Wind-Wafted Wild Flowers", August 1903. Original: "I will not follow where the path may lead, but I will go where there is no path, and I will leave a trail." Link: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/19/new-path/ Link: http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1651&context=ocj

  • "Don't be pushed by your problems, be led by your dreams."--No confirmed author.

  • "Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success."--No confirmed author.

  • "Every wall is a door."--No confirmed author.

  • "Finish every day and be done with it. For manners and for wise living it is a vice to remember. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. To-morrow is a new day; you shall begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense."--Unsourced Emerson Quote. According to James Elliot Cabot's Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1888) this was something he wrote "To one of his daughters who was away from home, at school."

  • "For every minute you remain angry you give up 60 seconds of happiness."-- Junius, "Office Cat", The Daily Freeman [Kingston, NY], 30 December 1936, p. 6. 

  • "Freedom is not the right to live as you please, but the right to find out how we ought to live in order to fulfill our potential."--No confirmed author.

  • "Life is a journey, not a destination."--No confirmed author, However Link: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/08/31/life-journey/ reports a similar quote. "To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom."--Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: Second Series, Chapter II: Experience,1844. Link: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2945/2945-h/2945-h.htm#link2H_4_0002

  • "Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting—a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing."-- Though attributed to Emerson in Edwards' A Dictionary of Thoughts (1908), p. 37, this quote originates in Politics for the People (1848) by Charles Kingsley. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson

  • "Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen." According to https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Ralph_Waldo_Emerson this is a quote by Paolo Coelho from his book The Alchemist.

  • "Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising up every time we fall."--Oliver Goldsmith as his pseudonym Lien Chi Altangi, The Public Ledger, 1960-1961. Link: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/27/rising/

  • "The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be."--No confirmed author. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/12/08/destined/

  • "Thought is a blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it."--No confirmed author.

  • "To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."--E.E. Cummings, A Poet's Advice, 1958. Original: "To be nobody - but -yourself-- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else--means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."

  • "To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."--Bessie A. Stanley. Link: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/06/26/define-success/

  • "Treat a man as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he could be, and he will become what he should be."--No confirmed author.

  • "Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies."--No confirmed author.

  • "Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow."--No confirmed author. Link: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/02/24/grow/

  • "What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you."--Henry S. Haskins, Meditations in Wall Street, 1940. Link: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/01/11/what-lies-within/

  • "What you are afraid to do is a clear indication of the next thing you need to do."--No confirmed author.

  • "When it is dark enough you can see the stars."--Charles A. Beard, as quoted in: Arthur H. Secord, "Condensed History Lesson", Readers' Digest, Vol. 38, No. 226 (February 1941), p. 20.

  • "Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change."--No confirmed author. Link: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/09/14/used-to-winning/

  • "Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it."--No confirmed author.

  • "You can never do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late."--No confirmed author.

Henry David Thoreau Quotes

• • "Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something."--Henry David Thoreau, from a letter to Harrison Blake, 27 March 1848. Link: http://monadnock.net/thoreau/blake.html

  • "All good things are wild and free."--Henry David Thoreau, "Walking", May 1862.

  • "As if you could kill time without injuring eternity."--Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Economy, 9 August 1854.

  • "Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads."--Henry David Thoreau, Walden, The Pond in Winter, 9 August 1854. Link: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm#linkW16

  • "How vain it is to sit down and write when you have not stood up to live."--Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 19 August 1951. https://www.walden.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Journal-2-Chapter-7.pdf

  • "I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest."--Henry David Thoreau, "Resistance to Civil Government" ("Civil Disobedience") (1849)

  • "Love is the wind, the tide, the waves, the sunshine."--Henry David Thoreau, Paradise (to be) Regained, 1843.

  • "If a man walks in the wood for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."--Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle, Paragraph 6, October 1863 

  • "In a world of peace and love music would be the universal language"--Henry David Thoreau, The Service (1840), Section II. What Music Shall We Have?

  • "In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood."--Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Wednesday, 1849.

  • "It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even the slang of today.--Henry David Thoreau, "Walking", May 1862.

  • "It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."--The correct quotation is from Thoreau’s Journal of 5 August 1851: “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” https://www.walden.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Journal-2-Chapter-7.pdf. The misattributed quotation is by Richard D. Richardson Jr who wrote “It is not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see” in his biography, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (University of California Press, 1986) p. 171. He was not quoting Thoreau.

  • "Life isn't about finding yourself; it's about creating yourself. So live the life you imagined."--modified form of Henry David Thoreau. The original is "I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours", Walden, XVIII. Conclusion, 9 August 1854.

  • "Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each."--Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 23 August 1853. https://www.walden.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Journal-5-Chapter-6.pdf

  • "My life has been the poem I would have writ--But I could not both live and utter it."--Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Friday, 1849.

  • "Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves."--possibly modified from Henry David Thoreau. A very similar quote from Walden: "Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations", Walden, VIII. The Village, 9 August 1854.

  • "Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth."--Henry David Thoreau, Walden, XVIII. Conclusion, 9 August 1854.

  • "Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all."--Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Sunday, 1849.

  • "The finest qualities of our nature like the bloom on flutes can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves, nor one another, thus tenderly".--Henry David Thoreau, Walden, I. Economy, 1854.

  • "The sun is but a morning star."--Henry David Thoreau, Walden, XVIII. Conclusion, 9 August 1854.

  • "The world is but canvas for our imagination."--Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Wednesday, 1849.

  • "There is no remedy for love only more love."--Henry David Thoreau, Journal 01, 1837-1846, July 25, 1839.

  • "Things do not change; we change."--Henry David Thoreau, Walden, XVIII. Conclusion, 9 August 1854.

  • "We are born as innocents. We are polluted by advice."--Spoken by the character Henry from the play The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail: A Play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (1969).  Still might be a genuine quote in one of his works. I haven't found it yet. Link: https://books.google.com/books?id=y7O2Mpt6zNsC&pg=PA37&lpg=PA37&dq=%22We+are+born+as+innocents.+We+are+polluted+by+advice.%22&source=bl&ots=m_S9XTSvy6&sig=QbkUBON6TYnJT9SGC-bifbvziZs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi98MemsYzXAhXhyFQKHaouBNsQ6AEIQzAJ#v=onepage&q=%22We%20are%20born%20as%20innocents.%20We%20are%20polluted%20by%20advice.%22&f=false

Walt Whitman Quotes

• • "I swear the Earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be completed. The Earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken."--Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Calamus, A Song of the Rolling Earth, 1856 and 1881. 

  • "Whatever satisfies the soul is truth." is modified from "Whatever satisfies souls is true."--Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Song of Prudence/Manhattan's Streets I Saunter'd, Pondering