Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

A long life is a life well spent.

It is vanity to desire a long life and to take no heed of a good life.

Eternal life is not primarily duration but quality of life, "life to the limit.

It is futile to wish for a long life, and then to give so little care to living well.

A man's life is like a well, not like a snake--it should be measured by its depth, not by its length.

It matters not how long we live but how.

It should be our care not so much to live a long life as a satisfactory one.

Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?

What good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?

There appears to exist a greater desire to live long than to live well! Measure by man's desires, he cannot live long enough; measure by his good deeds, and he has not lived long enough; measure by his evil deeds, and he has lived too long.

The quality, not the longevity, of one's life is what is important.

Now people live into their 90s and beyond. As long as I have quality of life, I'm good.

Perhaps one reason for the falling-off of belief in a continuance of conscious existence is to be found in the quality of life that most of us lead. There is not much in it with which, in any kind of reason, one can associate the idea of immortality.

Wellbeing is a notion that entails our values about the good life, and questions of values are not ultimately scientific questions.

Length of years is no proper test of length of life. A man's life is to be measured by what he does in it and what he feels in it.

The quality of life is more important than life itself.

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

Life is not just food, it's something spiritual.

Life, when is spent well, is long.

You are not important because of how long you live, you are important because of how effective you live.

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading -- that is a good life.

The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it

The measure of a man's life is the well spending of it, and not the length.

I am interested and deeply curious about our need for a spiritual life, a life of greater meaning, and how we come to a more ethical view of life within our communities that is more inclusive than exclusive, one that is extended even beyond our own species.

The point is, not how long you live, but how nobly you live.