13 Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes on Work

Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes on work

4. 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.

47. I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a 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, though it be in the woods.

69. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.

89. There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but though his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

143. Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in.

156. The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.

162. The hand that rounded Peter's dome, And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, Wrought in a sad sincerity, Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew, The conscious stone to beauty grew.

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

184. Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

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

232. For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?

253. Hitch your wagon to a star.

265. 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.