Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only thing grief as taught me is to know how shallow it is.

Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory.

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.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

The applause of a single human being is of great consequence.

An honest man is always a child.

A good End cannot sanctifie evil Means; nor must we ever do Evil, that Good may come of it. Some Folks think they may Scold, Rail, Hate, Rob and Kill too; so it be but for God’s sake. But nothing in us unlike him, can please him.

The receipts of cookery are swelled to a volume; but a good stomach excels them all.

The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.

Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.

The art of government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third.

If you miss the present moment, you miss your appointment with life. That is very serious!

The world will only, in the end, follow those who have despised as well as served it.

Courtesy Life be not so short but that there is always time for courtesy.

No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore, that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks! Where is the country’s champion, the Moore of Moore Hall, to meet him at the Deep Cut and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest?

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.