Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every calamity is a spur and a valuable hint.

The days come and go but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.

Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world: but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages.

God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.

Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.

Insist upon yourself. Be original.

He will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments

If we are related, we shall meet. It was a tradition of the ancient world, that no metamorphosis could hide a god from a god; and there is a Greek verse which runs, The Gods are to each other not unknown. Friends also follow the laws of divine necessity; they gravitate to each other, and cannot otherwise.

Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.

The faith that stands on authority is not faith.

Break the monotony. Do something strange and extravagant!