Ralph Waldo Emerson

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

The virtue in most request is conformity.

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.

Valor consists in the power of self recovery.

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’ is a snivelling modern invention, with no warrant in the gospels.

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

Whenever, therefore, people are deceived and form opinions wide of the truth, it is clear that the error has slid into their minds through the medium of certain resemblances to that truth.

Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

If thou wouldn’t conquer thy weakness thou must not gratify it.

I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can’t find anybody who can tell me what they want.

He that hath knowledge spareth his words.

There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.

Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.

I talk democracy to these men and women. I tell them that they have the vote, and that theirs is the kingdom and the power and the glory. I say to them You are supreme: exercise your power. They say, That’s right: tell us what to do; and I tell them. I say Exercise our vote intelligently by voting for me. And they do. That’s democracy; and a splendid thing it is too for putting the right men in the right place.

A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.

The only sin that we never forgive in each other is a difference in opinion.

The wound is the place where the light enters you.