Ralph Waldo Emerson
Works of the intellect are great only by comparison with each other.Collection: Intelligence
The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. The mind that grows could not predict the times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity. God enters by a private door into every individual.Collection: Mean
Tis good-will makes intelligence.Collection: Intelligence
Culture opens the sense of beauty.Collection: Beauty
Let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.Collection: Beauty
A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad.Collection: Beauty
Any extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm.Collection: Beauty
We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.Collection: Funny
We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise.Collection: Wise
The wise man, the true friend, the finished character, we seek everywhere, and only find in fragments.Collection: Friendship
Repose and cheerfulness is the badge of the gentleman; repose in energy.Collection: Character
Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring, a south wind, not an east wind.Collection: Wind
The mark of a man of the world is absence of pretension.Collection: Men
All persons are puzzles until at last we find in some word or act the key to the man, to the woman; straightway all their past words and actions lie in light before us.Collection: Lying
To fill the hour; that is happiness to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval.Collection: Happiness
If men would avoid that general language and general manner in which they strive to hide all that is peculiar, and would say only what was uppermost in their own minds, after their own individual manner, every man would be interesting.Collection: Truth
A man is not to aim at innocence, any more than he is to aim at hair, but he is to keep it.Collection: Truth
There is ever a slight suspicion of the burlesque about earnest good men.Collection: Truth
Nature forever puts a premium on reality. What is done for effect is seen to be done for effect; what is done for love is felt to be done for love. A man inspires affection and honor because he was not lying in wait for these.Collection: Truth
In the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party to his present estate.Collection: Party
History is the action and reaction of these two, nature and thought.Collection: Two
A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature.Collection: Horse
The chief value of the new fact is to enhance the great and constant fact of life.Collection: Knowledge
He that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he lovesCollection: Confusion
We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organ of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing by ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm.Collection: Philosophy
Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his.Collection: Men
I admire answers to which no answers can be made.Collection: Self Worth
I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.Collection: Sea
Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.Collection: Being Strong
For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.Collection: Happiness
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.Collection: About Life
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.Collection: Forgiveness
Its the not the destination, it’s the journey.Collection: Destination
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to leave the world a better place, to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, this is to have succeeded.Collection: Freedom
No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby – so helpless and so ridiculous.Collection: Country
Real men don’t conform to the beliefs of others, even when society has concluded on what is good and true, but maintain the integrity of their own mind.Collection: Real
There is no privacy that cannot be penetrated. No secret can be kept in the civilized world. Society is a masked ball where everyone hides his real character, then reveals it by hiding.Collection: Real