#ralph-waldo-emerson

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

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

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity—which nature cannot repair.

I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.

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

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

The soul is the receiver of the Over-Soul; it is the organ of that divine life which flows into it and through it.

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty.

The heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there, anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls through all.

The act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.

Every man is a channel through which heaven would pour forth its gifts, if he did not block the way.

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning.

The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles.

Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.

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

The field cannot be well seen from within the field; you must climb the mountain to understand the valley.

Every act rewards itself, or, in other words, integrates itself, in a twofold manner: first in the thing done, and secondly in the doer.

The dice of God are always loaded. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed.

He is base—and that is the one base thing in the universe—to receive favors and render none.

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

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

Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short in all management of human affairs.

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

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

There is no history; only biography.