Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say,—'Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act. Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson

2. Be an opener of doors

3. Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society. Essays: First and Second Series

4. For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

5. Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting some on yourself.

6. He thought it happier to be dead, To die for Beauty, than live for bread.

7. He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

8. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. Self-Reliance

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

10. Love, and you shall be loved.

11. Sorrow looks back, Worry looks around, Faith looks up

12. The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.

13. The good news is that the moment you decide that what you know is more important than what you have been taught to believe, you will have shifted gears in your quest for abundance. Success comes from within, not from without.

14. The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship Nature

15. The life of truth is cold. Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson

16. There is one other reason for dressing well, namely that dogs respect it, and will not attack you in good clothes.

17. To fill the hour──that is happiness.

18. To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.

19. To laugh often and much; to win the respect of the 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 beauty in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that one life has breathed easier because you lived here. This is to have succeeded.

20. Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it--else it is none.

21. Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

22. When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet. Essays

23. All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.

24. Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

25. Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

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

27. Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed. Self-Reliance

28. Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity. Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson

29. Every word was once a poem.

30. Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.