Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.

When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws.

Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.

A sudden bold and unexpected question does many times surprise a man and lay him open.

I always like people who have developed long and hard, particularly through introspection and a lot of dedication. I think that what they arrive at is, usually, deeper and more beautiful than the person who seems to have that ability and fluidity from the beginning.

If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.

A man must make his opportunity, as oft as find it.

It is better that some should be unhappy than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again – and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another’s and each obeying its own law.

You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.

Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

The person that had took a bull by the tail once had learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn’t, and said a person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn’t ever going to grow dim or doubtful. Chances are, he isn’t likely to carry the cat that way again, either. But if he wants to, I say let him!

Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world alters the world.

Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.