Ralph Waldo Emerson on Life

"Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not."

"The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny."

"Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better."

"Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better."

"Why have only two or three ways of life, and not thousands? Every man is wanted, and no man is wanted much."

"I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant."

"Of what use is genius, if the organ is too convex or too concave and cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon of human life?"

"Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it."

"A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days."

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."

"Tomorrow will be like today. Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live."

"The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization."

"We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them."

"Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy."

"Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood."

"Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can."

"We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples."

"Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any."

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

"Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die."

"We are always getting ready to live, but never living."

"Sorrow looks back, Worry looks around, Faith looks up"

"Genius borrows nobly. When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: "Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life."

"Life is our dictionary."

"For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, — a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing."

"Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus."

"The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible."

"Now shall we say that only the first men were well alive, and the existing generation is invalided and degenerate? ... A more subtle and severe criticism might suggest that some dislocation has befallen the race; that men are off their centre; that multitudes of men do not live with Nature, but behold it as exiles. People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in the world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority."

"Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for its moderation with its life. For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly. For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else; and for every thing you gain, you lose something. If riches increase, they are increased that use them. If the gatherer gathers too much, nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest; swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies and exceptions."

"In this pleasing contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt it, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects."