"Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate."
Read quote
6 likes
Quote collection
Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (page 73 of 211)
4.2K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live."
Read quote
6 likes
"Greatness is a property for which no man gets credit too soon; it must be possessed long before it is acknowledged."
Read quote
6 likes
"The book of nature is the book of fate. She turns the gigantic pages, leaf after leaf never returning one."
Read quote
6 likes
"Skill to do comes of doing."
Read quote
6 likes
"God has delegated himself to a million deputies."
Read quote
6 likes
"Give me wine to wash me clean of the weather-stains of cares"
Read quote
6 likes
"Get Health. No labor, effort nor exercise that can gain it must be grudged."
Read quote
6 likes
"There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy."
Read quote
6 likes
"Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to deed. A skillful man reads his dreams for his self-knowledge; yet not the details, but the quality. What part does he play in them - a cheerful, manly part, or a poor, drivelling part? However monstrous and grotesque their apparitions, they have a substantial truth."
Read quote
6 likes
"There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things."
Read quote
6 likes
"Difficulties exist to be surmounted."
Read quote
6 likes
"The man for whom the law exists - the man of forms, the conservative - is a tame man."
Read quote
6 likes
"We read often with as much talent as we write."
Read quote
6 likes
"The crime which bankrupts men and states is job-work-declining from your main design, to serve a turn here and there. Nothing is beneath you, if it is in the direction of your life, nothing is great or desirable if it is off from that. I think we are entitled here to draw a straight line and say that society can never prosper but must always be bankrupts, until every man does that which he was created to do."
Read quote
6 likes
"Nature: She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay."
Read quote
6 likes
"Every man's Reason is sufficient for his guidance, if used."
Read quote
6 likes
"A man must thank his defects, and stand in some terror of his talents."
Read quote
6 likes
"We are very near to greatness: one step and we are safe; can we not take the leap?"
Read quote
6 likes
"We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more."
Read quote
6 likes