Ralph Waldo Emerson

A few Words of Wisdom From Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self Reliance:

"Society Never Advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts."

"What your heart thinks great is great, the souls emphasis is always right"

"Every man is an impossibility, until he is born; everything impossible, until we see a success."

"Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which flows into you as life, place yourself in the full center of that flood, then you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment."

"All loss, all pain, is particular; the universe remains to the heart unhurt...For it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered; the infinite lies stretched in smiling response"

"If we look wider, we are all alike."

"Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fiber of the human heart....I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads of frost-work, but the solidest thing we know."

"Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and worth he sees....Take the book into your two hands, and read your eyes out; you will never find what I find."

"Polarity, or action and reaction. We meet in every part of nature; in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters; in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and animals; in the systole and diastole of the heart. Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts. The entire system of things gets represented in every particle."

"The Essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. Plenty it does not need, and can very well abide its loss."

"The intellect is a whole, and demands integrity in every work. This is resisted equally by a man's devotion to a single thought, and by his ambition to combine too many."