Our faith comes in moments... yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Can anybody remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Music causes us to think eloquently.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's opinions. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
That which we call sin in others, is experiment for us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world alters the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The sea, washing the equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid, and the power and empire that follow it... ''Beware of me,'' it says, ''but if you can hold me, I am the key to all the lands.''
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.