Ralph Waldo Emerson

Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing –to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.

Wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot.

Liberty is slow fruit. It is never cheap; it is made difficult because freedom is the accomplishment and perfectness of man.

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

I was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolisher.

The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.

Give a man health and a course to steer, and he’ll never stop to trouble about whether he’s happy or not.

People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

My finger can point to the moon, but my finger is not the moon. You don’t have to become my finger, nor do you have to worship my finger. You have to forget my finger, and look at where it is pointing.

My liver swells with bile difficult to repress.

Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.

My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologies. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought – with these I deal.

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.

If the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone.

Without a measureless and perpetual uncertainty, the drama of human life would be destroyed.

What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing about the origin and destiny of cats?

What do we live for; if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?