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Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude: Civilization, 1870:

"Hitch your wagon to a star."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims: Progress of Culture, 1876:

"Every artist was first an amateur."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims: Quotation and Originality, 1876:

"In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude: Works and Days, 1870:

"A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life; he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims: The Comic, 1876:

"Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, First Series: Prudence, 1841:

"Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life, "Fate," 1860:

"The reward of a thing well done is to have done it."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"The world belongs to the energetic."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge, and fox, and squirrel."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the

better."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"The only way to have a friend is to be one."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"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; begin it well and serenely

and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"When you strike at a king, you must kill him."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Nothing can bring you peace but yourself."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1839:

"The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Journals," 1836:

"Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Art," 1841:

"Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing."

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1845):

"Here is the world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a mark of haste, or botching, or second thought; but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"People only see what they are prepared to see."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"So of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more it remains."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"I hate quotations."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"A friend might well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature."

Emerson:

"Nature and Books belong to the eyes that see them."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock, should find the time in my face."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Each man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well -- he has changed his market-cart into a chariot of the sun."

Emerson:

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experience."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"People only see what they are prepared to see."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"We aim above the mark to hit the mark."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams."

Emerson:

"If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around you own."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"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 well and serenely..."

Emerson (1803-1882):

"Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who also knows why will always be his boss. As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Conduct of Life:

"The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"A friend might well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies."

Emerson:

"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."

Emerson:

"The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"There is no knowledge that is not power."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

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.

Social Aims:

Don't SAY things. What you ARE stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

R. W. Emerson:

Nothing great was ever acheived without enthusiasm.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"All co ves are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive." –

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little course, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice. Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he know that every day is Doomsday."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat; self-control is the rule."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"The faith that stand on authority is not faith."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"We are born believing. A man bears beliefs, as a tree bears apples."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"There is nothing capricious in nature and the implanting of a desire indicates that its gratification is in the constitution of the creature that feel it."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing"

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Every great and commanding moment in the annuls of the world is the triumph of some enthusiasm."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"If a man knows the law, find out, though he live in a pine shanty, and resort to him. And if a man can pipe or sing, so as to wrap the imprisoned soul in an elysium; or can paint a landscape, and convey into souls and ochres all the enchantments of Spring or Autumn; or can liberate and intoxicate all people who hear him with delicious songs and

verses; it is certain that the secret cannot be kept; the first witness tells it to a second, and men go by fives and tens and fifties to his doors."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Who so would be a man, must be a nonconformist."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"You must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"The only way to have a friend is to be one."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatest, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"No great man ever complains of want of opportunity."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"What a searching preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon of health."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"The sufferers parade their miseries, tear lint from their bruises, reveal their indictable crimes, that you may pity them.They like sickness, because physical pain will extort some show of interest from bystanders, as we have seen children, who, finding themselves of no account when grown people come in, will cough till they choke, to draw attention."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended halfness; a non performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, is comedy and it announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call laugther."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"We are prisoners of ideas."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"If a man's eye is on the Eternal, his intellect will grow."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Sooner of later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Nature hates calculators."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol, and an audience is electrified."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Sooner of later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"There are two classes of poets - the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"The imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Work is victory."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end. though you can render no reason."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Proverbs are the literature of reason, or the statements of absolute truth, without qualification. Like the sacred books of each nation, they are the sanctuary of its intuitions."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"The next thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs."

1

Nor knowest thou what argument

Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent.

All are needed by each one;

Nothing is fair or good alone.

Each and All.

2

I wiped away the weeds and foam,

I 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.

Ibid.

3

Not from a vain or shallow thought

His awful Jove young Phidias brought.

The Problem.

4

Out from the heart of Nature rolled

The burdens of the Bible old.

Ibid.

5

The hand that rounded Peter's dome,

And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,

Wrought in a sad sincerity;

Himself from God he could not free;

He builded better than he knew:

The conscious stone to beauty grew.

Ibid.

6

Earth proudly wears the Parthenon

As the best gem upon her zone.

Ibid.

7

Earth laughs in flowers to see her boastful boys

Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs;

Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet

Clear of the grave.

Hamatreya.

8

Good bye, proud world! I 'm going home;

Thou art not my friend, and I 'm not thine. 1

Good Bye.

9

For what are they all in their high conceit,

When man in the bush with God may meet?

Ibid.

10

"Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses."

The Rhodora.

11

Things are in the saddle,

And ride mankind. 2

Ode, inscribed to W. H. Channing.

12

Olympian bards who sung

Divine ideas below,

Which always find us young

And always keep us so.

Ode to Beauty.

13

Heartily know,

When half-gods go,

The gods arrive.

Give all to Love.

14

Love not the flower they pluck and know it not,

And all their botany is Latin names.

Blight.

15

The silent organ loudest chants

The master's requiem.

Dirge.

16

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,

Here once the embattl'd farmers stood,

And fired the shot heard round the world. 3

Hymn sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument.

17

What potent blood hath modest May!

May-Day.

18

And striving to be man, the worm

Mounts through all the spires of form.

Ibid.

19

And every man, in love or pride,

Of his fate is never wide.

Nemesis.

20

None shall rule but the humble,

And none but Toil shall have.

Boston Hymn. 1863.

21

Oh, tenderly the haughty day

Fills his blue urn with fire.

Ode, Concord, July 4, 1857.

22

Go put your creed into your deed,

Nor speak with double tongue.

Ibid.

23

So nigh is grandeur to our dust,

So near is God to man,

When Duty whispers low, Thou must,

The youth replies, I can!

Voluntaries.

24

Whoever fights, whoever falls,

Justice conquers evermore.

Ibid.

25

Nor sequent centuries could hit

Orbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit.

Solution.

26

Born for success he seemed,

With grace to win, with heart to hold,

With shining gifts that took all eyes.

In Memoriam.

27

Nor mourn the unalterable Days

That Genius goes and Folly stays.

Ibid.

28

Fear not, then, thou child infirm;

There 's no god dare wrong a worm.

Compensation.

29

He thought it happier to be dead,

To die for Beauty, than live for bread.

Beauty.

30

Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill?

Pay every debt, as if God wrote the bill!

Suum Cuique.

31

Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die.

Quatrains. Nature.

32

Though love repine, and reason chafe,

There came a voice without reply,--

"'T is man's perdition to be safe

When for the truth he ought to die."

Sacrifice.

33

For what avail the plough or sail,

Or land or life, if freedom fail?

Boston.

34

If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. 4

Nature. Addresses and Lectures. The American Scholar.

35

There is no great and no small 5

To the Soul that maketh all;

And where it cometh, all things are;

And it cometh everywhere.

Essays. First Series. Epigraph to History.

36

Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.

History.

37

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

Ibid.

38

A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.

Ibid.

39

The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Self-Reliance.

40

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

Ibid.

41

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Ibid.

42

Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.

Ibid.

43

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

Compensation.

44

It is as impossible for a man to be cheated by any one but himself, as for a thing to be and not to be at the same time.

Ibid.

45

Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions.

Ibid.

46

Every action is measured by the depth of the sentiment from which it proceeds.

Spiritual Laws.

47

All mankind love a lover.

Love.

48

A ruddy drop of manly blood

The surging sea outweighs;

The world uncertain comes and goes,

The lover rooted stays.

Epigraph to Friendship.

49

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature.

Friendship.

50

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

Circles.

51

There is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of behaviour yield to the energy of the individual.

Essays. Second Series. Manners.

52

And with Cæsar to take in his hand the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, and say, "All these will I relinquish if you will show me the fountain of the Nile."

New England Reformers.

53

He is great who is what he is from Nature, and who never reminds us of others.

Representative Men. Uses of Great Men.

54

Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in? 6

Montaigne.

55

Thought is the property of him who can entertain it, and of him who can adequately place it.

Shakespeare.

56

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue.

English Traits. Race.

57

I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes.

Manners.

58

A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence.

Aristocracy.

59

The manly part is to do with might and main what you can do.

The Conduct of Life. Wealth.

60

The alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity in beasts, is a power behind the eye.

Behaviour.

61

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.

Ibid.

62

Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better.

Considerations by the Way.

63

God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth.

Society and Solitude.

64

Hitch your wagon to a star.

Civilization.

65

I rarely read any Latin, Greek, German, Italian, sometimes not a French book, in the original, which I can procure in a good version. I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven. I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.

Books.

66

We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.

Old Age.

67

Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.

Letters and Social Aims. Social Aims.

68

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

Quotation and Originality.

69

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. 7

Ibid.

70

When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies, "Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life."

Ibid.

71

In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

Ibid.

72

The passages of Shakespeare that we most prize were never quoted until within this century.

Ibid.

73

Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force; that thoughts rule the world.

Progress of Culture. Phi Beta Kappa Address, July 18, 1867.

74

I do not find that the age or country makes the least difference; no, nor the language the actors spoke, nor the religion which they professed, whether Arab in the desert or Frenchman in the Academy. I see that sensible men and conscientious men all over the world were of one religion. 8

Lectures and Biographical Sketches. The Preacher.

Note 1

See Byron, Quotation 67.

Note 2

I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden.--Rumbold (when on the scaffold).

Note 3

No war or battle sound

Was heard the world around.

John Milton: Hymn of Christ's Nativity, line 31.

Note 4

Everything comes if a man will only wait.--Benjamin Disraeli (Earl Beaconsfield): Tancred,

book iv. chap. viii.

Note 5

See Pope, Quotation 20.

Note 6

See Davies, Quotation 2.

Note 7

There is not less wit nor less invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought. Cardinal du Perron has been heard to say that the happy application of a verse of Virgil has deserved a talent.--Bayle: vol. ii. p. 779.

Though old the thought and oft exprest,

'T is his at last who says it best.

James Russell Lowell: For an Autograph.

Note 8