Ralph Waldo Emerson

That which builds is better than that which is built.

It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him.

The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.

Life consists in what a person is thinking of all day.

What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men’s minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.

Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.

Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Children are all foreigners.

The test of a man or woman’s breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

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.

Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.

Guilt, regret, resentment, sadness and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past and not enough presence.

The greatest meliorator of the world is selfish, huckstering Trade.

Where you stand depends on where you sit.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

Strivers achieve what dreamers believe.

It isn’t safe to sit in judgment upon another person’s illusion when you are not on the inside. While you are thinking it is a dream, he may be knowing it is a planet.

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake . . . by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.

There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.

A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.