Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

A chief event of life is the day in which

we have encountered a mind that startled us.

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants,

and to serve them one's self?

The best effort of a fine person is

felt after we have left their presence.

Speak the truth,

and all things alive or brute are vouchers,

and the very roots of the grass underground there,

do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.

Nothing is at last sacred but

the integrity of your own mind.

The fox has many tricks.

The hedgehog has but one.

But that is the best of all.

Fear defeats more people than

any other one thing in the world.

I hate quotations.

Tell me what you know.

For everything you have missed,

you have gained something else,

and for everything you gain,

you lose something else.

Every man I meet is in some way my superior.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose.

It cannot have both.

O Day of days when we can read!

The reader and the book,

either without the other is naught.

It is the quality of the moment,

not the number of days,

or events,

or of actors,

that imports.

I like the silent church before the service begins,

better than any preaching.

Every man has his own courage,

and is betrayed because he seeks in himself

the courage of other persons.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Little minds have little worries,

big minds have no time for worries.

A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart

into his work and done his best;

but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.

We do not yet possess ourselves,

and we know at the same time that we are much more.

Men admire the man who can organize

their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.