Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

What do you care? You always liked loneliness better than you liked people. No offence liking yourself's the beginning of all love.

People always get tired of one another. I grow tired of myself whenever I am left alone for ten minutes, and I am certain that I am fonder of myself than anyone can be of another person.

You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.

I think you learn more about yourself in the context of a relationship than you can outside of it.

Solitude shows us what should be; society shows us what we are.

I don't know what other people are like, I haven't been able to crawl inside anybody else.

It's the differences in people that help you realize who you are. Even if we silently pass each other on the street.

We saw in him what we seek in ourselves.

How different a creature is man in society and man in solitude!

I learned so much about life and other human beings - then about myself.

I'm trying to use myself and my own flawedness as a metaphor for general human experience. I'm trying to 'stand next to' a subject, whether it's Bobby Knight or Vince Carter, and use that subject to meditate on both him and me.

Thinking is like loving and dying. Each of us must do it for himself.

It's hard to tell what people realize. Everybody's different and has a different understanding of the difference in times.

Our minds are all different and I believe cultivating a keen introspective sensitivity is absolutely essential in discovering our potential.

It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.

I like when people know exactly, have a good sense of themselves, and know exactly what's good for them, I admire that, but I don't have anywhere near that kind of perspective on my own.

People who do not understand themselves have a craving for understanding — a thing which is rather surmised and never spoken than known and clothed in words.

Impossible; for how many people did you know who refracted your own light to you?

Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.

Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's opinions.

In learning to know other things, and other minds, we become more intimately acquainted with ourselves, and are to ourselves better worth knowing.

I used to be too subjective, and I was always tempted to find my inner self in the exterior and dissipate my imagination on other people and on life.

No one ever has time to examine himself honestly, and most people look no further than their neighbors' eyes, in which they may see their own reflection.

Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you.