Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes for UPSC

The soul is subject to dollars.

Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstance.

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome.

Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.

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

Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.

How we hate this solemn Ego that accompanies the learned, like a double, wherever he goes.

Character is higher than intellect...A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.

Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.

The music that can deepest reach, And cure all ill, is cordial speech.

You can never do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

To live without duties is obscene.

No man can have society upon his own terms. If he seeks it, he must serve it too.

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

We plant trees, we build stone houses, we redeem the waste, we make prospective laws, we found colleges and hospitals, for remote generations.

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue.

Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.

Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the state.

A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

Talents differ; all is well and wisely put; If I cannot carry forests on my back, Neither can you crack a nut.

To-day unbind the captive, So only are ye unbound; Lift up a people from the dust, Trump of their rescue, sound!

There is no knowledge that is not power.

Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master at some point, and in that, I learn of him.

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science.

Bad times have a scientific value. [...] We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea.

If a man own land, the land owns him.

A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence.

The horseman serves the horse, The neatherd serves the neat, The merchant serves the purse, The eater serves his meat; 'Tis the day of the chattel, Web to weave, and corn to grind; Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have yet to be discovered.

Hast thou named all the birds without a gun; Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk.

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

A nation never falls but by suicide.

Nor knowest thou what argument Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent: All are needed by each one, Nothing is fair or good alone.

When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.

Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. No hope so bright but is the beginning of its own fulfillment.

I see that sensible men and conscientious men all over the world were of one religion.

A good symbol is the best argument and is a missionary to persuade thousands.

The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.

The manly part is to do with might and main what you can do.

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances...Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Every really able man, in whatever direction he work,—a man of large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter,—if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be.

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.

We are always getting ready to live, but never living.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

Life is too short to waste The critic bite or cynic bark, Quarrel, or reprimand; 'Twill soon be dark; Up! mind thine own aim, and God speed the mark!

The days .... come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

There are always two parties, the party of the Past and the party of the Future: the Establishment and the Movement. At times the resistance is reanimated, the schism runs under the world and appears in Literature, Philosophy, Church, State and social customs.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend.

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.

A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.

Some of your hurts you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived, But what torments of grief you endured From evils which never arrived!

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

That what we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.

Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.