Ralph Waldo Emerson

Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods loved him because men hated him.

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

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

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

Sincerity is the highest complement you can pay.

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

A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.

Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.

The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes a low business-tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact. He calls his employment by its lowest name, and so takes from evil tongues their sharpest weapon. His conversation clings to the weather and the news, yet he allows himself to be surprised into thought, and the unlocking of his learning and philosophy.

Never learn to do anything. If you don’t learn, you will always find someone else to do it for you.

He shines in the second rank, who is eclipsed in the first.

Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic.

There are no have-to’s, just choices.

If you protect a man from folly, you will soon have a nation of fools.

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

The eagle has ceased to scream, but the parrots will now begin to chatter. The war of the giants is over and the pigmies will now start to squabble.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

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.

No comment is a splendid expression. I am using it again and again.