Ralph Waldo Emerson

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

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

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

We judge of man’s wisdom by his hope.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — `Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?

A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it.

Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost.

Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.

Hasty resolutions are of the nature of vows, and to be equally avoided

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree. We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.

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

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

Sometimes the place you are used to is not the place you belong.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?

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

Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled.

We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.