Ralph Waldo Emerson

Mr. Emerson visited Thoreau at the jail, and the meeting between the two philosophers must have been interesting and somewhat dramatic. The account of the meeting was told me by Miss Maria Thoreau Henry Thoreaus auntHenry, why are you here? Waldo, why are you not here?

If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it.

Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.

In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind about the moralities.

You and I are essentially infinite choice-makers. In every moment of our existence, we are in that field of all possibilities where we have access to an infinity of choices.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

Every being is in search of truth, but small fears go on preventing you.

The aim of spiritual life is to awaken a joyful freedom, a benevolent and compassionate heart in spite of everything.

Believe that each day that shines on you is your last.

Nothing does reason more right, than the coolness of those that offer it: For Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders, than from the arguments of its opposers.

Writers are the engineers of human souls.

Many things difficult in design prove easy in performance.

It is by the goodness of God that we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.

Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large mattertis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author’s own life into them.