Ralph Waldo Emerson

God screens us evermore from premature ideas.

Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.

Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.

It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.

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

A man’s library is a sort of harem.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man’s title to fame.

The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

I believe that he was really sorry that people would not believe he was sorry that he was not more sorry.

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

No man is fit to command another that cannot command himself.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

Everything that is made beautiful and fair and lovely is made for the eye of one who sees.

He who has never hoped can never despair.

Then I realized that secrecy is actually to the detriment of my own peace of mind and self, and that I could still sustain my belief in privacy and be authentic and transparent at the same time. It was a pretty revelatory moment, and there’s been a liberating force that’s come from it.

No member of society has the right to teach any doctrine contrary to what society holds to be true.

Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with celestial air, until it eclipses the sun and moon.

It is only through labour and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage; that we move on to better things.

If he really thinks there is no distinction between vice and virtue, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.

Associate reverently, as much as you can, with your loftiest thoughts.

The pen is the tongue of the mind.