Tag: #Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wisest quotes of all time

Sometimes the word quote is used as shorthand for quotation, a passage of speech or writing that’s repeated word for word.

As a verb, to quote means to repeat someone’s words, attributing them to their originator.

When one writes out a quote, one puts the other person’s words in quotation marks (“Aha!”).

To my Dearest Emily

A drop of Wisdom in an ocean of Ignorance, Stupidity and Madness, that this world has become lately… Sad…

May these quotes from bright minds all over the planet guide you on Your path !

From Papi with Love

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules…

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius…”

Steve Jobs

“If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life.

There are no limits.

There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.”

Bruce Lee

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

”Buddha was asked, “What have you gained from meditation?”

He replied, “Nothing!”

However, Buddha said, let me tell you what I lost: Anger, Anxiety, Depression, Insecurity, Fear of Old, Age and Death.”

Buddha

“The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don’t tell you what to see.”

Alexandra K. Trenfor

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

Plato

“Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Steve Jobs

“Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small.

A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.”

Lao Tzu

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world.

Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Margaret Mead

“In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

George Orwell

Man: ‘I want happiness’

Buddha: First remove ”I”, this is Ego.

Then remove “Want”, this is desire.

Finally all that remains is “Happiness.”

Buddha

“Logic will get you from A to B.

Imagination will take you everywhere.”

Albert Einstein

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”

Carl Jung

“I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.”

Bruce Lee

“Never let school interfere with your education.”

Mark Twain

“The real question is not whether life exists after death.

The real question is whether you are alive before your death.”

Osho

“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.”

Lao Tzu

“He who controls others may be powerful but he who has mastered himself is mightier still.”

Lao Tzu

“You have enemies?

Good; that means you have stood up for something, sometime in your life.”

Winston Churchill

“To live is the rarest thing in the world.

Most people exist, that is all.”

Oscar Wilde

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”

Albert Einstein

“Loneliness is and will always be the most abundant source of human experience.”

Swami Vivekanand

“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”

Eleanor Roosevelt

“You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable.

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.”

J.K. Rowling

“Our prime purpose in this life is to help others.

And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.”

Dalai Lama

“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.”

Christopher McCandless

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life.

When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.

I wrote down “Happy.”

They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”

John Lennon

“Everybody is a genius.

But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Albert Einstein

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Gandhi

“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.”

Henry van Dyke

“You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.”

Wayne Gretzky

“We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

Aristotle

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

Aristotle

“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”

Socrates

“Life isn’t about finding yourself.

Life is about creating yourself.”

George Bernard Shaw

“The flower that blooms in adversity is the rarest and most beautiful of all.”

Walt Disney Company, “Mulan”

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection”

Gautama Buddha

“The past has no power over the present moment.”

Eckhart Tolle

“The truth is, everyone’s going to hurt you.

You’ve just got to find the ones worth suffering for.”

Bob Marley

“Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

J.K. Rowling

“A man who conquers himself is greater than one who conquers a thousand men   in battle”

Buddha

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.”

Ancient Chinese Proverb

“An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.”

Mahatma Gandhi

“A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.”

Mahatma Gandhi

“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.         Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.”

Carl Jung

“Never be bullied into silence, never allow yourself to be made a victim.
Accept no one’s definition of your life,
define yourself.”

Robert Frost

“Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising every time we fail.”

Confucius

“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”

Albert Einstein

“Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers    to turn on the light.”

JK Rowling

“Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.”

Eckhart Tolle

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”

T. S. Eliot

“Not all those who wander are lost.”

J. R. R. Tolkien

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.” – Mark Twain

“Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.”

Robert Frost

“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words but to live by them.”

John F. Kennedy

“With everything that has happened to you, you can either feel sorry for yourself or treat what has happened as a gift. Everything is either an opportunity to grow or an obstacle to keep you from growing. You get to choose.”



“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.”— Albert Einstein

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

“We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” – Socrates

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.” ~ Steve Jobs

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow.

Learn as if you were to live forever.”

Mahatma Gandhi

“In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count.

It’s the life in your years.”

Abraham Lincoln

“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus!

That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t.

We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”

Charles Bukowski

“Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened.

Happiness never decreases by being shared.”

Buddha

“Sing like no one’s listening, love like you’ve never been hurt, dance like nobody’s watching, and live like its heaven on earth.”

Mark Twain

“Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?

Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh.

To be great is to be misunderstood.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.

These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern.

Beautiful people do not just happen.”

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

“All life is an experiment.

The more experiments you make, the better.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Know thyself.”

Socrates


“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”

Socrates

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Socrates

“Happiness is not something ready made.
It comes from your own actions.”

Dalai Lama

“The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.”

Aristotle

“It is not in the stars to hold our destiny, but in ourselves.”

William Shakespeare

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The wisest mind has something yet to learn.”

George Santayana

“The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.”

Helen Keller

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”

Aristotle

Leave a trail…

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.

He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and his ideology was disseminated through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.

Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay “Nature”.

Following this work, he gave a speech entitled “The American Scholar” in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America’s “Intellectual Declaration of Independence.”

Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first and then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), represent the core of his thinking. They include the well-known essays “Self-Reliance”, “The Over-Soul”, “Circles”, “The Poet”, and “Experience.” Together with “Nature”, these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson’s most fertile period.

Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for mankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world.

Emerson’s “nature” was more philosophical than naturalistic: “Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul.”

Emerson is one of several figures who “took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world.”

He remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement, and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that followed him.

“In all my lectures,” he wrote, “I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.” Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, a fellow transcendentalist.

As a lecturer and orator, Emerson—nicknamed the Sage of Concord — became the leading voice of intellectual culture in the United States.

James Russell Lowell, editor of the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review, commented in his book My Study Windows (1871), that Emerson was not only the “most steadily attractive lecturer in America,” but also “one of the pioneers of the lecturing system.”

Herman Melville, who had met Emerson in 1849, originally thought he had “a defect in the region of the heart” and a “self-conceit so intensely intellectual that at first one hesitates to call it by its right name”, though he later admitted Emerson was “a great man”.

Theodore Parker, a minister and transcendentalist, noted Emerson’s ability to influence and inspire others: “the brilliant genius of Emerson rose in the winter nights, and hung over Boston, drawing the eyes of ingenuous young people to look up to that great new star, a beauty and a mystery, which charmed for the moment, while it gave also perennial inspiration, as it led them forward along new paths, and towards new hopes”.

Emerson’s work not only influenced his contemporaries, such as Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, but would continue to influence thinkers and writers in the United States and around the world down to the present.

Notable thinkers who recognize Emerson’s influence include Nietzsche and William James, Emerson’s godson. There is little disagreement that Emerson was the most influential writer of 19th-century America, though these days he is largely the concern of scholars.

Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau and William James were all positive Emersonians, while Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James were Emersonians in denial—while they set themselves in opposition to the sage, there was no escaping his influence.

To T. S. Eliot, Emerson’s essays were an “encumbrance”. Waldo the Sage was eclipsed from 1914 until 1965, when he returned to shine, after surviving in the work of major American poets like Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane.

In his book The American Religion, Harold Bloom repeatedly refers to Emerson as “The prophet of the American Religion”, which in the context of the book refers to indigenously American religions such as Mormonism and Christian Science, which arose largely in Emerson’s lifetime, but also to mainline Protestant churches that Bloom says have become in the United States more gnostic than their European counterparts.

In The Western Canon, Bloom compares Emerson to Michel de Montaigne: “The only equivalent reading experience that I know is to reread endlessly in the notebooks and journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American version of Montaigne.”

Several of Emerson’s poems were included in Bloom’s The Best Poems of the English Language, although he wrote that none of the poems are as outstanding as the best of Emerson’s essays, which Bloom listed as “Self-Reliance”, “Circles”, “Experience”, and “nearly all of Conduct of Life”.

In his belief that line lengths, rhythms, and phrases are determined by breath, Emerson’s poetry foreshadowed the theories of Charles Olson.