Ralph Waldo Emerson

Today is a king in disguise.

Whenever you are sincerely pleased you are nourished.

I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot.

Only poetry inspires poetry.

Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes.

Let us my friends snatch our opportunity from the passing day.

Compound for sins they are inclined to by damning those they have no mind to.

How earthy old people become moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets.

Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.

New ideas come into this world somewhat like falling meteors, with a flash and an explosion, and perhaps somebody

There is still vitality under the winter snow, even though to the casual eye it seems to be dead.

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly-full of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.

You can free yourself from aging by reinterpreting your body and by grasping the link between belief and biology.

Ladies and gentleman are permitted to have friends in the kennel, but not in the kitchen.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

He who praises every body, praises nobody.