Traveling is a fool's paradise.… I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

About Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, minister, abolitionist, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society and...

More quotations from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

life experiment

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

honesty truth privacy

In a virtuous community, men of sense and of principle will always be placed at the head of affairs. In a declining state of public morals, men will be so blinded to their true interests as to put the incapable and unworthy at the helm. It is therefore vain to complain of the follies or crimes of a government. We must lay our hands on our own hearts and say, "Here is the sin that makes the public sin.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

sin morality government interests

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

possibility plants trees forests

More quotations tagged with “paradise”

Paradise is exactly like where you are right now… only much, much better.

—Laurie Anderson

now paradise better

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

—Joni Mitchell

paradise

Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.

—Voltaire

love paradise tenderness

To hope for Paradise is to live in Paradise, a very different thing from actually getting there.

—Vita Sackville-West

hope paradise

The only paradise is paradise lost.

—Marcel Proust

paradise impossibility

History

2 Jan 2015 Added
26 Oct 2026 Wording changed

Previous wording

Traveling is a fool's paradise. . . . I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.