Steve > Steve's Quotes

“Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“People only see what they are prepared to see.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work but the solidest things we know.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Be good to your work, your word, and your friend.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson on Self Reliance

“Write it on your heart
that every day is the best day in the year.
He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day
who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.

Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.
Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with your old nonsense.

This new day is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on the yesterdays.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Collected Poems and Translations

“Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature and Selected Essays

“We boil at different degrees.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We are wiser than we know.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Money often costs too much”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Our best thoughts come from others.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Moderation in all things, especially moderation.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals Of Ralph Waldo Emerson, With Annotations - 1841-1844

“Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means to an education.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Men are respectable only as they respect.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gulistan Or Rose Garden

“The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar: Self-Reliance, Compensation

“It does not to dwell on dreams and forget to live, but it is equally foolish to ignore the past – never forget.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“She shows us only surfaces but Nature is a million fathoms deep.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don't believe I deserved my friends.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, First Series

“We must be our own before we can be another's.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Genius always finds itself a century too early.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson