Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I was praised I lost my time, for instantly I turned around to look at the work I had thought slightly of, and that day I made nothing new.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace, and not pollute the morning.

A man cannot free himself by any self-denying ordinances, neither by water nor potatoes, nor by violent possibilities, by refusing to swear, refusing to pay taxes, by going to jail, or by taking another man’s crops or squatting on his land. By none of these ways can he free himself; no, nor by paying his debts with money; only by obedience to his own genius.

The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature.

He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds.

We must substitute courage for caution.

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.

Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists – talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having.

The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred on me. However, few escape that distinction.

When you’re first figuring yourself out, you care so much about what people think of you.

The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

Tomorrow is always another day to make things right.

People who can’t be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

That which we call sin in others, is experiment for us.

Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: -in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.