Ralph Waldo Emerson

Stay at home in your mind. Don’t recite other people’s opinions. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.

Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

Who can guess how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes?

Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.

Can anybody remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?

When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

We are wiser than we know.

He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.

I am a child of the House of Commons. I was brought up in my fathers house to believe in democracy. Trust the peoplethat was his message.

It is not what we eat but what we digest that makes us strong; not what we gain but what we save that makes us rich; not what we read but what we remember that makes us learned; and not what we profess but what we practice that gives us integrity.

Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.

Not only must we be good, but we must also be good for something.

Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker upon the planet. Then all things are at risk.

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity. The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

Why should we be cowed by the name of Action?