Old Glory

“Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity” and other Quotations by American Essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson is a well-known US poet, thinker and writer. He was born in May 1803. Emerson died April 1882 in Massachusetts.

Emerson is famous as one thought-leader of the American Transcendentalist movement.

Emerson was a talented writer and orator and is very often quoted in print and in speeches. We have arranged a collection of his most famous quotations for your reading pleasure.

The Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes:

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

That which we persist in doing becomes easier, not that the task itself has become easier, but that our ability to perform it has improved.

A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

I see her not dispirited, not weak, but well, remembering that she has seen dark times before, indeed with a kind of instinct that she sees a little better in a cloudy day.

The only gift is a portion of thyself.

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 little better; whether by a healthy child, a garden patch of a redeemed social condition; to know that one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is the meaning of success.

The first wealth is health.

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.

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

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

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.

There is always room for a man of force, and he makes room for many.

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

People wish to be settled. It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them.

When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

All mankind love a lover.

Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.

To fill the hour-that is happiness.

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow.

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

It seems to me that perfection of means and confusion of goals seems to characterize our age.

Money often costs too much.

Every man is a divinity in disguise, a God playing the fool.

In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.

What greater pain could mortals have than this To see their children dead before their eyes

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution when the old and the new stand side by side…when the glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era This time…is a very good one…

What we call results are beginnings.

It is very hard to be simple enough to be good.

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the path of each man’s genius contracts itself to a very few hours.

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

Wit makes its own welcome and levels all distinctions.

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