Famous Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

If a man owns land, the land owns him.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, tho it be in the woods.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

If we encountered a man or rare intellect, we should ask him what books he read. - Ralph Waldo Emerson,
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you had taken off the shoe then, at length you would feel in what part it pinched you.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you shoot at a king you must kill him.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Imitation is suicide.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

In every work of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoon how it might be made difference? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Insist on yourself; never imitate.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is dainty to be sick if you have leisure and convenience for it.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is dainty to be sick, if you have leisure and convenience for it.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson