Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants and to serve them one's self, so as to have somewhat left to give, instead of being always prompt to grab?”

“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.”

“A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends. For every friend whom he loses for truth, he gains a better.”

“The years teach much which the days never know.”

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

“Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one's own sunshine.”

“A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.”

“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”

“The only way to have a friend is to be one.”

“A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.”

“What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.”

“Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.”