"Ralph Waldo Emerson"の名言

Life consists of what man is thinking about all day.

The reward of a thing well done is having done it.

Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

There is one other reason for dressing well, namely that dogs respect it, and will not attack you in good clothes.

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it.

We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities.

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.

He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.

Napoleon said of Massena, that he was not himself until the battle began to go against him; then, when the dead began to fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination, and he put on terror and victory as a robe. So it is in rugged crises, in unweariable endurance, and in aims which put sympathy out of question, that the angel is shown.

Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' The youth whispers, 'I can.

I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn

In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it--else it is none.

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.