Life Emerson Quotes & Sayings

A man known to us only as a celebrity in politics or in trade, gains largely in our esteem if we discover that he has some intellectual taste or skill. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The years teach us much, which the days never knew. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The advantage in education is always with those children who slip up into life without being objects of notice. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is one of the beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We do not live an equal life, but one of contrasts and patchwork; now a little joy, then a sorrow, now a sin, then a generous or brave action. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Christ has given us the most glorious interpretation of life's meaning that man has ever had. The fatherhood of God, the fellowship of the Spirit, the sovereignty of righteousness, the law of love, the glory of service, the coming of the Kingdom, the eternal hope- there was never an interpretation of life to compare with that. — Harry Emerson Fosdick

Let not the tie be mercenary, though the service is measured in money. Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

There's a lot of life there, but it's a different sort, because there's a lot less immigrants and a lot more racial, the mix of black and white in particular. I've actually never been to their worship for an extended period of time, so I can't comment wisely on it. — Michael Emerson

Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The sweetest music is not in the oratorio, but in the human voice when it speaks from its instant life tones of tenderness, truth, or courage. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I know nothing which life has to offer so satisfying as the profound good understanding, which can subsist, after much exchange ofgood offices, between two virtuous men, each of whom is sure of himself, and sure of his friend. It is a happiness which postpones all other gratifications, and makes politics, and commerce, and churches, cheap. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Why should I hasten to solve every riddle which life offers me? I am well assured that the Questioner, who brings me so many problems, will bring me the answers also, in due time. — 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

Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart. — Mary Oliver

Ever the words of the gods resound; But the porches of man's ear seldom in this low life's round are unsealed, that he may hear. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Alone again, Beverly relaxed somewhat. It was hard to believe that life could get any worse than this. More than once lately, she had thought about killing herself, erasing the fact that she had ever existed. It would be so easy, so - except that she wouldn't. She didn't respect people who committed suicide. — Ellen Emerson White

The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself and whatever science or art or course of action he engages in reacts upon and illuminates the recesses of his own mind. Thus friends seem to be only mirrors to draw out and explain to us ourselves; and that which draws us nearer our fellow man, is, that the deep Heart in one, answers the deep Heart in another,
that we find we have (a common Nature)
one life which runs through all individuals, and which is indeed Divine. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

How much of human life is lost in waiting. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Most of the shadows of life are caused by standing in our own sunshine. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life has no memory. That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being conscious, knows not its own tendency. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The tragic evils of our life are so commonly unintentional. We did not start out for that poor, cheap goal. That aim was not in our minds at all ... Look to the road you are walking on. He who picks up one end of [a] stick picks up the other.He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to. — Harry Emerson Fosdick

I close my eyes at his intimate touch. It's a slow movement, not one meant to seduce. It's one to show how much he loves me, and I flatten my lips, fighting the urge to cry. Noah nudges me toward him and if it wasn't for his hold, I'd drop like a house of cards.
I fall into him, and Noah wraps me in his arms. "It's okay, baby. We're okay."
I cling tighter to him, because it doesn't feel okay. For the past two months, life was good and easy and everything I dreamed it could be. Despite my efforts, the muscles at the corner of my mouth tremble. I wanted to be done with tears and with whispered comments thrown in my direction like knives and with this overwhelming sense that I'm less and that I'll never belong. — Katie McGarry

If I have renounced the search of truth, if I have come into the port of some pretending dogmatism, some new church, some Schelling or Cousin, I have died to all use of these new events that are born out of prolific time into multitude of life every hour. I am as bankrupt to whom brilliant opportunities offer in vain. He has just foreclosed his freedom, tied his hands, locked himself up and given the key to another to keep. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science was false by being unpoetical. It assumed to explain a reptile or a mollusk, and isolated it-which is hunting for life in graveyards. Reptile or mollusk or man or angel only exists in system, in relation. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

If in the least particular, one could derange the order of nature, who would accept the gift of life? — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A person's life is limited but serving the people is limitless. I want to devote my limited life to serving the people limitlessly. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

For all our penny-wisdom, for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all men have sublime thoughts; that all men value the few real hours of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up into the vision of principles. We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had, in the dreary years of routine and of sin, with souls that made our souls wiser; that spoke what we thought; that told us what we knew; that gave us leave to be what we only were. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think that the heroism which at this day would make on us the impression of Epaminondas and Phocion must be that of a domestic conqueror. He who shall bravely and gracefully subdue this Gorgon of Convention and Fashion, and show men how to lead a clean, handsome and heroic life amid the beggarly elements of our cities and villages; whoso shall teach me how to eat my meat and take my repose and deal with men, without any shame following, will restore the life of man to splendor, and make his own name dear to all history. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

When the act of reflection takes place in the mind, when we look at ourselves in the light of thought, we discover that our life is embosomed in beauty. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

No mountain is of any appreciable height to break the curve of the sphere. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing -to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

In every man's memory, with the hours when life culminated are usually associated certain books which met his views. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Man's life is a progress, not a station. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I find a provision in the constitution of the world for the writer or secretary, who is to report the doings of the miraculous spirit of life that everywhere throbs and works. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hidden away in the inner nature of the real man is the law of his life, and someday he will discover it and consciously make use of it. He will heal himself, make himself happy and prosperous, and life in an entirely different world. For he will have discovered that life is from within and not from without. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Telescope, the Fluxions, the invention of Logarithms and the frenzy of multiplication, often for its own sake, that follow'd have for Emerson all been steps of an unarguable approach to God, a growing clarity,- Gravity, the pulse of time, the finite speed of Light present themselves to him as aspect of God's character. It's like becoming friendly with an erratic, powerful, potentially dangerous member of the Aristocracy. He holds no quarrel with the Creator's sovereignty, but is repeatedly appall'd at the lapses in Attention, the flaws in Design, the squand'rings of life and energy, the failures to be reasonable, or to exercise common sense,- first appall'd, then angry. We are taught,- we believe,- that it is love of the Creation which drives the Philosopher in his Studies. Emerson is driven, rather, by a passionate Resentment. — Thomas Pynchon

Our life seems not present, so much as prospective; not for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint of this vast- flowingvigor. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I would study, I would know, I would admire forever. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Prayer that craves a particular commodity - anything less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

From the views I have already expressed, you will infer the sad conviction, which I share, I believe, with numbers, of the universal decay and now almost death of faith in society. The soul is not preached. The Church seems to totter to its fall, almost all life extinct. On this occasion, any complaisance would be criminal which told you, whose hope and commission it is to preach the faith of Christ, that the faith of Christ is preached. It — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Insist on your life, never imitate ... do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life. Ralph Waldo Emerson. — Lorenz Font

The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

No steam or gas drives anything until it is confined. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, and disciplined. — Harry Emerson Fosdick

The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics or practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers' hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows in poverty, necessity and darkness. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws. It perceives that this homely game of life we play, covers, under what seem foolish details, principles that astonish. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is, as Emerson says, some central idea or conception of yourself by which all the facts of your life are arranged and classified. Change this central idea and you change the arrangement or classification of all the fact and circumstances of your life. — Wallace D. Wattles

Life will be simpler when I don't spend two-thirds of the year in the middle of the Pacific. — Michael Emerson

In order for one to learn the important lessons of life, one must first overcome a fear each day. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men of sense esteem wealth to be the assimilation of nature to themselves, the converting of the sap and juices of the planet to the incarnation and nutriment of their design. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Improve your spare moments and they will become the brightest gems in your life. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wherever the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is our dictionary — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The House
... She lays her beams in music,
In music every ore,
To the candence of the whirling world
Which dances round the sun-
That so they shall not be displaced
By lapses or by wars,
But for the love of happy souls
Out live the newest stars. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man is a hero, not because he is braver than anyone else, but because he is brave for ten minutes longer. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions, that around us arerushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The dead sleep in their moonless night; my business is with the living. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I must have killed a lot of cows in a past life for Karma to hate me this much. — Katie McGarry

Every man is a borrower and a mimic, life is theatrical and literature a quotation. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The simpler explanation,' Emerson with a distinct uvular component in his Sigh, 'may be that none of you people has ever known a moment of Transcendence in his life, nor would recognize one did it walk up and bit yese in the Arse, - and in the long sorry Silence, grows the suspicion that Jesuits are but the latest instance of a true Christian passion evaporated away, leaving no more than the usual hollow desires for Authority and mindless O-bedience. — Thomas Pynchon

Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance,
what ample borrowers of eternity they are! — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is a series of surprises. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The brevity of human life gives a melancholy to the profession of the architect. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our chief want in life is somebody who will make us do what we can. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are no days in life that are so memorable as those that vibrate to some stroke of the imagination. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I read a good book, I wish my life were three thousand years long. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

As it often did when I thought about chicken wings and entropy, my mind turned to Emerson. "Life is a journey, not a destination." Now that was one stone-cold motherfucker who was not afraid to deliver the truth: After the torments of the journey, you have been well-prepared for the agonies of the destination. — Colson Whitehead

I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

To me, however, the question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live? We are incompetent to solve the times. Our geometry cannot span the huge orbits of the prevailing ideas, behold their return, and reconcile their opposition. We can only obey our own polarity. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is an experiment. The more experiments the better — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity; that, at least one may replace the parent. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I will no longer confer, differ, refer, defer, prefer, or suffer. I renounce the whole tribe of fero. I embrace absolute life. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are books ... which rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Liz Emerson held so much darkness within her that closing her eyes didn't make much a difference at all. — Amy Zhang

Life," said Emerson, "consists in what a man is thinking all day." If that be so, then my life is nothing but a big intestine. I not only think about food all day, but I dream about it at night. — Henry Miller

The best of life is conversation. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is the doctrine of the popular music-masters, that whoever can speak can sing. So, probably, every man is eloquent once in his life. Our temperaments differ in capacity of heat, or — Ralph Waldo Emerson

One of the most beautiful compensations in life is that no person can help another without helping themselves — Ralph Waldo Emerson

This infantile sense of order tended to infect my life at large. Up at 5:30 a.m., coffee, oatmeal, perhaps sausage (homemade), and fresh eggs giving one of the yolks to Lola. Listening to NPR and grieving more recently over the absence of Bob Edwards who was the sound of morning as surely as birds. Reading a paragraph or two of Emerson or Loren Eiseley to raise the level of my thinking. Going out to feed the cattle if it was during our six months of bad weather. — Jim Harrison

Most people made comments on how I was the strongest woman they knew.
That was before the title wave of disaster hit my charmed life. — K.D. Emerson

The years in your life
are less important
than the life in your years. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

That which dominates our imagination and our thoughts will determine our life and character. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

[A]s if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand ... — Ralph Waldo Emerson

a man only knows what he's experienced — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life only avails, not the having lived. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Although this garrulity of advising is born with us, I confess that life is rather a subject of wonder, than of didactics. So muchfate, so much irresistible dictation from temperament and unknown inspiration enter into it, that we doubt we can say anything out of our own experience whereby to help each other. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar's dinner, from a hundred charities? — Ralph Waldo Emerson

How many attractions for us have our passing fellows in the streets, both male and female, which our ethics forbid us to express, which yet infuse so much pleasure into life. A lovely child, a handsome youth, a beautiful girl, a heroic man, a maternal woman, a venerable old man, charm us, though strangers, and we cannot say so, or look at them but for a moment. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is a search after power; and this is an element with which the world is so saturated,-there is no chink or crevice in which it is not lodged,-that no honest seeking goes unrewarded. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Imitation is suicide. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

There was never a man born so wise or good, but one or more companions came into the world with him, who delight in his faculty, and report it. I cannot see without awe, that no man thinks alone and no man acts alone, but the divine assessors who came up with him into life,
now under one disguise, now under another,
like a police in citizen's clothes, walk with him, step for step, through all kingdoms of time. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make that man another you. One's enough. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, - What is truth? and of the affections, - What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will ... Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit. — Ralph Waldo Emerson