Ralph Waldo Emerson

The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near.

No orator can top the one who can give good nicknames.

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.

If you injure your neighbour, better not do it by halves.

Some look at things that are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not?

Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.

The best reformers the world has ever seen are those who commence on themselves.

The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness.

The remedy is worse than the disease.

When the eagles are silent the parrots begin to jabber.

Them meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

I’ve learned that from my husband, that sort of, you know, ability to not get too high or too low with changes and bumps in the road.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

We are all alike, on the inside.

The roses under my window make no reference to former roses or better ones; they are what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.

The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.

It’s all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.