Ralph Waldo Emerson

The President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne.

The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

Knowledge and human power are synonymous.

The reward of one’s duty is the power to fulfill another.

Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds.

Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content.

I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.

I have not a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming vices.

I am not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call common sense; a man of a strong affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic. There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune in making money. Men talk as if there were some magic about this. He knows that all goes on the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent – for every effect a perfect cause – and that good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.

I strive to be brief, and I become obscure.

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

Croesus said to Cambyses; That peace was better than war; because in peace the sons did bury their fathers, but in wars the fathers did bury their sons.

Nay, Madam, when you are declaiming, declaim; and when you are calculating, calculate.

When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else… you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.

Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.