“A great man is always willing to be little.”

Chapters: 67. Three Treasures

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

Chapters: 43. No Effort, No Trace

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“A woman’s strength is the irresistible might of weakness.”

Chapters: 61. Lying Low

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“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.”

Chapters: 63. Easy as Hard

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“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

Chapters: 27. No Trace

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“Envy is ignorance, imitation is Suicide.”

Chapters: 25. The Mother of All Things

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“In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.”

Chapters: 77. Stringing a Bow

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“Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

Chapters: 41. Distilled Life

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“It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Chapters: 76. The Soft and Flexible

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“Life is a journey, not a destination.”

Chapters: 81. Journey Without Goal

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“Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.”

Chapters: 30. No War

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“People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.”

Chapters: 38. Fruit Over Flowers

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“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.”

Chapters: 64. Ordinary Mind

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“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… Success comes from within, not from without.”

Chapters: 65. Simplicity: the Hidden Power of Goodness

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“The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.”

Chapters: 71. Sick of Sickness

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“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

Chapters: 33. Know Yourself

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

Chapters: 21. Following Empty Heart

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“What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”

Chapters: 63. Easy as Hard

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“Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.”

Chapters: 62. Basic Goodness

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“One man's beauty is another's ugliness; one man's wisdom, another's folly.”

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“Blessed be nothing. The worse things are, the better they are.”

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“We can never understand Christianity from a catechism but from the pastures, from a boat in the pond, from the songs of wood birds—we possibly can.”

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“You will have joy or you will have power, said God. You will not have both.”

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

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“Every burned book enlightens the world.”

from Compensation

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

from Progress of Culture

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“The first of books and the voice of an old intelligence.”

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“Only that mind draws me that I cannot read... The power men possess to annoy me, I give them with a weak curiosity.”

from Journals, 1847

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“I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful give of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom has yet contributed... I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; for the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty”

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“A poet for poets, he fears nothing. He sees too far; he sees throughout; such is the only man I wish to … be.”

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“We can never see Christianity from the catechism—from the pastures, from a boat in the pond, from amidst the songs of wood-birds we possibly may.”

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“Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.”

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“Webster was the most complete man... nature has not in our days or not since Napoleon, cut out such a masterpiece.”

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“Culture opens the sense of beauty... A cultivated man—wise to know and bold to perform—is the end to which nature works.”

from The Conduct of Life, 1860

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“[Reading Proclus] I am filled with hilarity and spring, my heart dances, my sight is quickened, I behold shining relations between all beings, and am impelled to write and almost to sing.”

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“The god of Victory is said to be one handed, but Peace gives victory to both sides.”

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“Fame is proof that people are gullible.”

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“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better.”

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“What is a weed? A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.”

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“Earth laughs in flowers.”

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“His rare science and practical skill, and the added fame of second sight and extraordinary religious knowledge and gifts... suggests... A colossal soul. He lies vast abroad on his times, uncomprehended by them, and requires a long focal distance to be seen.”

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“In nature, nothing can be given, all things are sold.”

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“If a man owns land, the land owns him.”

from Conduct of Life

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“Poverty demoralizes.”

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“The highest virtue is always against the law.”

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“The high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man, is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness.”

from Conduct of Life

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“Politics is a deleterious profession, like some poisonous handicrafts. Men in power have no opinions, but may be had cheap for any opinion, for any purpose.”

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“Every revolution was once a thought in one man's mind. When the same thought occurs to another man... it will solve the problem of the age.”

from History

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“No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.”

from Compensation

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“The Americans have many virtues, but they have no Faint and Hope... They rely on the power of the dollar; they are deaf to sentiment. They think you may talk the north wind down as easily as raise society”

from The Reformer (1841)

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

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“a country where knowledge cannot be diffused without the perils of mob law and statute law... that country is, in all these respects, not civil, but barbarous”

from Civilization (1862)

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“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday.”

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“Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.”

from Journals (1861-1865)

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“What is success? 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”

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“Poetry must be as new as foam, and as old as the rock.”

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“A human being should be aware of how he laughs, for then he shows all his faults.”

from Journals (1836)

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“It is proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.”

from The Conduct of Life (1860)

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“I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.”

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“innovation is always in the right, triumphant, attacking and sure of final success”

from The Conservative (1841)

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“What a man is born for is to be a Reformer, a Remaker of what man has made; a renouncer of lies; a restorer of truth and good”

from The Reformer (1841)

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“We boast of our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols it is through a transfer of idolatry”

from Character

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“innovation is always in the right, triumphant, attacking and sure of final success.”

from The Conservative (1841)

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“conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth... Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry... Conservatism tends to universal seeming and treachery, believes in a negative fate; believes the men's temper governs them;”

from The Conservative (1841)

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“Prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft.”

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“The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land.”

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“We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.”

from Representative Men (1850)

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“The wise skeptic is a bad citizen; no conservative; he sees the selfishness of property and the drowsiness of institutions.”

from Representative Men (1850)

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“The less government we have the better—the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse... is the individual... the appearance of the wise man; of whom the existing government is but a shabby imitation.”

from Politics

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“Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today—you shall be sure to be misunderstood but is it so bad to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

from Representative Men (1850)

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

from Self-Reliance

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“Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.”

from Prudence

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

from Self-Reliance

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“Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist... I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badge and names, to large societies and dead institutions... For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.”

from Self-Reliance

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“He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness... A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

from Self-Reliance

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“Truth is our element of life; yet if a man fasten his attention on a single aspect of truth and apply himself to that alone for a long time, the truth becomes distorted, and not itself, but falsehood”

from The Over-Soul

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“Good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.”

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“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

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“Don’t be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams.”

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“Always do what you are afraid to do.”

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“As men's prayers are a disease of the intellect, so are their creeds a disease of the will.”

from Self Reliance

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“Traveling is s fool's paradise. Those who travel to be amused, or to get something they don't already have, travel away from themselves and grow old even in youth. The soul is no traveler and the wise stay at home except for when duty calls them away. But even when traveling in foreign lands, they are still at home and tour like a missionary of wisdom and virtue visiting people and cities lie a sovereign, not like an interloper or valet.”

from Self Reliance

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“Archimedes and Kant are as much realists as blacksmiths: they deal with intellections as vigorously and drastically as the joiner with his chisel and board”

from Journals and Letters

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“a little water instantly relieves monotony... no matter what objects are near it;—a grey rock, a little grass, a crab-tree or alder bush, a stake,—they instantly become beautiful by being reflected”

from Journals and Letters

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Every book is a quotation, and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone quarries, and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.”

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“Though thou loved her as thyself, as a self of purer clay,
Though her parting dims the day, stealing grace from all alive;
Heartily know, when half-god go, the gods arrive.”

from Give All to Love

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“Live no longer to the expectation of those deceived and deceiving people with who we converse... I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you... I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility.”

from Essays

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“Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance, what ample borrowers of eternity they are!”

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“The new statement is always hated by the old, and to those living in the old, comes like an abyss of scepticism.”

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“History is the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.”

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“Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind.”

from Ode (1847)

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“refuse the good models, even those sacred in the imagination of men... The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity and bereaves himself of his own beauty to come short of another man's.”

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“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.”

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“There are always two parties the party of the Past and the party of the Future; the Establishment and the Movement... a war between intellect and affection.”

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“'Miracles have ceased.' Have they indeed? They had not ceased this afternoon when I walked into the wood and got into bright, miraculous sunshine, in shelter from the roaring wind.”

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“From Emerson to Thoreau to Gandhi to MLK to Mandela. One idea in many forms, passed along from one giant to another. Perhaps the greatest relay race in the history of inspiration...It's the lineage of an idea that has evolved and been adapted for two centuries.”

— Deepak Malhotra 1
"Professor of the Year"

from Peacemaker's Code

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“The only fire-brand of my youth that burns to me as brightly as ever is Emerson.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. 1841 – 1935 CE
Game-changing Supreme Court Justice
from Letter 1930​

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“Emerson was capable of wonder. He was not a naturalist, or a specialist, but a philosopher who saw life steadily and saw it whole.”

— Lín Yǔtáng 林語堂 1895 – 1976 CE
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950

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“Dad said I would always be 'high minded and low waged' from reading too much Ralph Waldo Emerson. Maybe he was right.”

— Jim Harrison 1937 – 2016 CE
"untrammeled renegade genius”
from English Major​

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