For Halloween this year, my wife decided that I would be Waldo from the Where’s Waldo? series of books. I decided to tell people that I was dressing up as Ralph Waldo Emerson. I thought, I could tell them that I was Ralph Waldo Emerson and then quote him. So, I went to Google and searched for “quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson.” I was astonished! There was wonderful and helpful quote after wonderful and helpful quote.
Now, I didn’t tell many people that I was Ralph Waldo Emerson, and I didn’t remember any of the quotes. What I realized, though, was that I needed to read. I have now read several of his essays, but I love his book The Conduct of Life. Emerson provides so much solid advice for thinking about life well and living well. Here are ten quotes from this book that will help you think and live well.
These quotes are taken from Emerson: Essays and Lectures. You can read this book online here.
1. “To me, however, the question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live? We are incompetent to solve the times” (943). Focus on living well and what you have power over, don’t swamp your brain with worries about the big issues you can’t control.
2. “The first wealth is health. Sickness is poor-spirited, and cannot serve any one; it must husband its own resources to live. But health or fulness (sic) answers its own ends, and has to spare, runs over, and inundates the neighborhoods and creeks of other men’s necessities” (972). If we are not healthy, we cannot push forward. If we are healthy, our life will flow over in blessings to others.
3. “[I]n our flowing affairs a decision must be made,—the best, if you can; but any is better than none. There are twenty ways of going to a point, and one is the shortest; but set out at once on one” (983). Try to do something significant. Don’t get paralyzed by trying to figure out what the exact best is.
4. “No genius can recite a ballad at first reading so well as mediocrity can at the fifteenth or twentieth reading” (984). We grow through working at things over a long period of time, and there is no substitute.
5. “Incapacity of melioration is the only mortal distemper” (1019). The person who cannot grow is the only person who has no hope.
6. “[The boy] hates the grammar and Gradus, and loves guns, fishing-rods, horses, and boats. Well, the boy is right; and you are not fit to direct his bringing up, if your theory leaves out his gymnastic training. Archery, cricket, gun and fishing-rod, horse, and boat, are all educators, liberalizers; and so are dancing, dress, and the street-talk . . .” (1021). Study, but get out and experience the wildness of life!
7. “A man in pursuit of greatness feels no little wants” (1027). Set your sights on something big, and small setbacks won’t matter nearly so much.
8. “Let us learn to live coarsely, dress plainly, and lie hard. The least habit of dominion over the palate has certain good effects not easily estimated” (1027). Every attempt to do something difficult pays huge dividends.
9. “The calamities are our friends . . . If there is any great thing in store for you, it will not come at the first or the second call, not in the shape of fashion, ease, and city drawing-rooms. Popularity is for dolls. ‘Steep and craggy,’ said Porphyry, ‘is the path of the gods’” (1031–1032). We’ve got to learn to see challenges, suffering, and setbacks as opportunities for growth not as unmitigated evils.
10. “Our chief want in life is, somebody who shall make us do what we can. This is the service of a friend. With him we are easily great” (1093). We need people who will help bring great things out of us.
11. “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” (1117).