I. Frost's Selected Quotations

Everything at Amazon by and about: Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)


I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Every man I meet is in some way my superior.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

The reward for a thing well done is to have done it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

To be great is to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

We are wiser than we know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

We boil at different degrees.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Always do what you are afraid to do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Women see better than men. Men see lazily, if they do not expect to act. Women see quite without any wish to act.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminate by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

If eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. (1803-1882)The Rhodora.

If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
Nature. Addresses and Lectures. The American Scholar.

There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all;
And where it cometh, all things are;
And it cometh everywhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. (1803-1882)Essays. First Series. Epigraph to History.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. (1803-1882) Ibid.

A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. (1803-1882)Ibid.

Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. (1803-1882)Ibid.

It is as impossible for a man to be cheated by any one but himself, as for a thing to be and not to be at the same time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. (1803-1882)Ibid.

Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. (1803-1882)Ibid.

Every action is measured by the depth of the sentiment from which it proceeds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. (1803-1882)Spiritual Laws.

There is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of behaviour yield to the energy of the individual.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. (1803-1882)Essays. Second Series. Manners.

Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force; that thoughts rule the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. (1803-1882)Progress of Culture. Phi Beta Kappa Address, July 18, 1867.

Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The highest virtue is always against the law.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

People only see what they are prepared to see.