EMERSON QUOTES


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

"[The poet] perceives that thought is multiform; that within
the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend
into a higher form."

"I have a house, a closet which holds my books, a table, a
garden, a field: are these, any or all, a reason for refusing
the angel who beckons me away, - as if there were no room or
skill elsewhere that could reproduce for me as my like or my
enlarging wants may require?"
-Immortality

"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you
could. Some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them
as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it
serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your
old nonsense."

"What is life but what a man is thinking of all day?"

"Has he a defect of temper that unfits him to live in society?
Thereby he is driven to entertain himself alone and acquire habits
of self-help, and thus, like the wounded oyster, he mends his
shell with pearl."

"It is not length of life, but depth of life."

"...that there is a remedy for every wrong and a satisfaction for
every soul. Here is this wonderful thought. But whence came it?
Who put it in the mind? It was not I, it was not you; it is elemental,
- belongs to thought and virtue, and whhenever we have either we see
beams of this light."
-Immortality

"The retribution in the circumstance is seen by the understanding; it
is inseparable from the thing, but is often spread over a long time
and so does not become distinct until after many years. The specific
stripes may follow later after the offence, but they follow
because they accompany it."
-Compensation

"The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they
are more himself than he is. They receive of the soul as he also
receives, but they more."
-The Poet

"Will you with vast cost and pains, educate your children to be
adepts in their several arts, and, as soon as they are ready to
produce a masterpiece, call out a file of soldiers to shoot them down?"
-Immortality

"Such also the the natural history of calamity. The changes which
break up at short intervals the prosperity of men are advertisements
of a nature whose law is growth. Every soul is by this intrinsic
necessity quitting its whole system of things, its friends and
home and laws and faith, as the shell-fish crawls out of its
beautiful but stony case, because it no longer admits of its growth."
-Compensation

"He finds that things are arranged for truth and benefit, but there
is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and
the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a
coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the
track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole. You
cannot recall the spoken word, you cannot wipe out the foot-track,
you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or clue."
-Compensation

"Always pay; for first or last you must pay your entire debt.
Persons and events may stand for a time between you and justice,
but it is only a postponement."
-Compensation

"Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the
unwise seek to dodge, which one and another brags that he does not
know, that they do not touch him; - but the brag is on his lips,
the conditions are in his soul. If he escapes them in one part
they attack him in another more vital part."
-Compensation

"Self-trust and self-reliance were to be practiced at all times
and on all occasions, since to trust self was really to trust the
voice of God speaking intuitively within us."
-Handbook