Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.

People do not deserve to have good writings; they are so pleased with the bad.

Nature… She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

Conversation enriches the understanding; but solitude is the school of genius.

Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation.

The most dangerous people are those who have passion but lack wisdom.

You must avoid sloth, that wicked siren.

Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of the human mind.

One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

Ahh, that mountain of self-discovery. Every time you have reached the summit, the clouds clear and you see there is still a ways to go. Don’t look up with thoughts of despair; thinking how much further do I have to go?! Take a moment and look back to see how far you have come. Don’t lose sight of your accomplishments, and focus on the continued commitment to self-discovery and development.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

Regardless of who you are or what you have been, you can be what you want to be.

It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, Know thyself, and too often leads to a self-estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.

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

Associate reverently, as much as you can, with your loftiest thoughts.

I think there’s a great beauty to having problems. That’s one of the ways we learn.

Make yourself necessary to somebody.

In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.