Last Updated on 20 June 2024

Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

• Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
• Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.
• It is not the length of life, but the depth.
• It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life, that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.
• The lover has more senses and finer senses than others.
• The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.
• The only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.
• The only way to have a friend is to be one.
• The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.
• 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.
• Thought takes man out of servitude into freedom.
• To be great is to be misunderstood.
• To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
• Trust men, and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great.
• Truth is too simple for us; we do not like those who unmask our illusions.
• Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort.
• Valor consists in the power of self-recovery.
• We must carry the beautiful with us, or we find it not.
• What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.