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What matters most is not what is behind us or before us, but what is within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Age: 78 †
Born: 1803
Born: May 25
Died: 1882
Died: April 27
Biographer
Diarist
Essayist
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
R. W. Emerson
Waldo Emerson
Behinds
Behind
Within
Matter
Matters
More quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Congratulate yourself if you have done something strange, extravagant and broken the monotony.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
An orchard, good tillage, good grounds, seem a fixture, like a gold mine, or a river, to a citizen but to a large farmer, not much more fixed than the state of the crop.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and second secrets of nature: Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A good indignation makes an excellent speech.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life has no memory. That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being conscious, knows not its own tendency.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Teach the children! It is painting in fresco.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of particular meanings. But how great a language to convey such pepper-corn informations!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I find it a great and fatal difference whether I court the Muse, or the Muse courts me. That is the ugly disparity between age and youth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The bulk of mankind believe in two gods. They are under one dominion here in the house, as friend and parent, in social circles, in letters, in art, in love, in religion but in mechanics, in dealing with steam and climate, in trade, in politics, they think they come under another.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Well, the world has a million writers. One would think, then, that good thought would be as familiar as air and water, and the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all our good books nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
No orator can top the one who can give good nicknames.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What I need is someone who will make me do what I can.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The best part of health is fine disposition
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I see it only that thyself is here, and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels and the supreme being shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All reform aims, in some one particular, to let the soul have its way through us in other words, to engage us to obey.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
