Ralph Waldo Emerson

The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.

One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

Be true to your own act and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant to break the monotony of a decorous age.

Life too near paralyses art.

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

When you discover your mission, you will feel its demand. It will fill you with enthusiasm and a burning desire to get to work on it.

The advice that is wanted is commonly not welcome and that which is not wanted, evidently an effrontery.

Even the best things are not equal to their fame.

We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.

No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.

The greatest gift is the ability to forget – to forget the bad things and focus on the good.

That observation which is called knowledge of the world will be found much more frequently to make men cunning than good.

A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

It is not given to us to peer into the mysteries of the future. Still, I avow my hope and faith, sure and inviolate, that in the days to come the British and American peoples will for their own safety and for the good of all walk together side by side in majesty, in justice, and in peace.

Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers but dress in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.

Be not simply good – be good for something.

Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.

If you want to get what you want give up being right.

When you have told anyone you have left him a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.