Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

A commencement is a time of joy. It is also a time of melancholy. But then again, so is life.

Life is a tragedy full of joy.

Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative - whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.

What I dislike about movie culture is that it often presents a parable of our problems - but the issues are all straightforward and the people are either nice or they're not. In real life, everyone falls between those perimeters, but not many American films operate in that grey area.

I have so many moments. I am extremely passionate about life and at the same time, I'm always depressed, so everything's always happening at the same time for me. It's the best day and the worst day too.

I think I have a pattern of nice and lovely and then dark and twisted.

Life is not simple, and people can't be boxed into being either heroes or villains.

Human life is a combination of tragedy and comedy. The shapes and designs that surround us are the music accompanying this tragedy and this comedy.

A minute to smile and an hour to weep in, A pint of joy to a peck of trouble, And never a laugh but the moans come double; And that is life!

You could be laughing one day about the same issues that you're crying about the next day, so that's life.

Pools of sorrow. Waves of joy.

Our life is...a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment.

All our pride is but a jest. None are worst and none are best. Grief and hope and joy and fear Play their pageant everywhere.

This is life! It can harden and it can exalt!

There is no harbor of peace from the changing waves of joy and despair.

That it should be the questions and shape of a life, its total complexity gathered, arranged, and considered, which matters in the end, not some stamp of salvation or damnation that disperses all the complexity into some unsatisfying little decision - the balancing of scales.

For life, with all its yields of joy and woe Is just a chance o' the prize of learning love.

There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses.

But it seemed to me that this was the way we all lived: full to the brim with gratitude and joy one day, wrecked on the rocks the next. Finding the balance between the two was the art and the salvation.

Love is never a fulfillment. Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life.

My mind's cries tell me that everything on earth is tragic. My heart's smiles tell me that everything on earth is magic.

Life is about change, sometimes it's painful, sometimes it's beautiful, but most of the time it's both.

In any profession, there are always ups and downs.