Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood. . . .

When I turned 45, I lay in bed reflecting on all life had taught me. My soul sprang a leak and ideas flowed out. My pen simply caught them and set the words on paper. I typed them up and turned them into a newspaper column of the 45 lessons life taught me. When I hit 50, I added five more lessons and the paper ran the column again.

What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on.

I'm writing my biography. It's my business. This is what happened in my life, and I'm writing about it.

In youth men are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel; and the remainder of life may be not idly spent in realizing and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered long ago.

Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.

People who keep journals have life twice

For two extraordinary years I have been working on it - learning to write - but mostly learning how to tell the truth. At first it is quite impossible. You make yourself better than anybody, then worse than anybody, and when you finally come to see you are "like" everybody - that is the bitterest blow of all to the ego. But in the end it is only the truth, no matter how ugly or shameful, that is right, that fits together, that makes real people, and strangely enough - beauty.

I think at the age of 50, everyone should write their own autobiography.

Your debut record, in terms of lyrical content, can be about the last couple of years of your life obviously, but your first record into the world is also about everything else that you've ever experienced in your life until that moment.

It's always painful when you're writing memoirs because you've got to go through the dark places, but it gives you a chance to find out the person you really are, not the person you thought you were.

I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority).

Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

Adventure is something you seek for pleasure, or even for profit, like a gold rush or invading a country;...but experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.

The world - this shadow of the soul, or other me - lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding tumult... So much only of life as I know by experience... The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power.

I write to make sense of my life." -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey

The first thing you learn in life is you're a fool. The last thing you learn in life is you're the same fool.

It is admirable to consider how many millions of people come into, and go out of the world, ignorant of themselves and of the world they have lived in.

Self-discovery in songwriting, bringing something forth that's instructive to yourself - some of the best songs that you will ever write are the ones where you didn't have to think about any of that stuff, but nonetheless that's what's happening in the song.

I feel blessed to have had the accumulation of life experiences that I've had, life experience just adds to the depths of a persons richness, as with acting!

There are defining moments in one's life when you learn about yourself, and you deposit that knowledge in the experience account, so you can draw on it at some later date.

Every year there's a few more things I'm not sure of. I've decided that a wide-ranging uncertainty is the mark of the true maturity of man.

One writes not to be read but to breathe...one writes to think, to pray, to analyze. One writes to clear one's mind, to dissipate one's fears, to face one's doubts, to look at one's mistakes--in order to retrieve them. One writes to capture and crystallize one's joy, but also to disperse one's gloom. Like prayer--you go to it in sorrow more than joy, for help, a road back to 'grace'.

I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow