Ralph Waldo Emerson
459 quotations
A great man stands on God. A small man on a great man.
He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others.
My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock should find the time in my face.
To fill the hour -- that is happiness.
Happiness is a perfume which you cannot pour on someone without getting some on yourself.
Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign is cheerfulness -- an open and noble temper.
Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.
Many might go to Heaven with half the labor they go to hell.
Every hero becomes a bore at last.
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.
Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right.
Our best history is still poetry.
It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.
We are prisoners of ideas.
It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances.
That man is idle who can do something better.
The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.
We live by our imagination, our admiration s, and our sentiments.
Science does not know its debt to imagination.
There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.
Imagination is not a talent of some people but is the health of everyone.
Imitation is suicide.