Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.

Talent for talent’s sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.

Knowledge comes by eyes always open and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power.

The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.

Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.

O friend, never strike sail to a fear! Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas.

The last book I read was the book I’ve been rereading most of my life, The Fountainhead.

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

Classic – A book which people praise and don’t read.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution – such call I good books.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Whatever our fate is or may be, we have made it and do not complain of it. – Vronksy (Anna Karenina)

I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.