Lys > Lys's Quotes

“Be silly. Be honest. Be kind.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson , Essays, First Series

“When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest things we can know.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, First Series

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Finish each 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. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, not the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.”
― Ronald E. Osborn

“Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays

“You become what you think about all day long.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourself.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Nothing external to you has any power over you.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
― Ralph Waldo Emmerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“Life is short, but there is always time enough for courtesy.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I must be myself. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men’s, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as well as mine, and if we follow the truth it will bring us out safe at last.—But so may you give these friends pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments of reason, when they look out into the region of absolute truth; then will they justify me and do the same thing.
The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays

“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals

“The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”
― Emerson

“Beauty without expression is boring.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson