Ralph Waldo Emerson

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.

Gross and obscure natures, however decorated, seem impure shambles; but character gives splendor to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and gray hairs.

Every great achievement is the victory of a flaming heart.

Some men are born to own, and can animate all their possessions. Others cannot: their owning is not graceful; seems to be a compromise of their character: they seem to steal their own dividends.

Mr. Emerson visited Thoreau at the jail, and the meeting between the two philosophers must have been interesting and somewhat dramatic. The account of the meeting was told me by Miss Maria Thoreau Henry Thoreaus auntHenry, why are you here? Waldo, why are you not here?

The reward of a thing well done is having done it.

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

Drunkenness spoils health, dismounts the mind, and unmans man. It reveals secrets, is quarrelsome, lascivious, impudent, dangerous, and mad.

In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

Your own safety is at stake when your neighbor’s wall is ablaze.

While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till grief be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.

As for doing good; that is one of the professions which is full. Moreover I have tried it fairly and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.

We like a man to come right out and say what he thinks, if we agree with him.

Technique is noticed most markedly in the case of those who have not mastered it.

Every one is a genius, more or less. No one is so physically sound that no part of him will be even a little unsound, and no one is so diseased but that some part of him will be healthy — so no man is so mentally and morally sound, but that he will be in part both mad and wicked; and no man is so mad and wicked but he will be sensible and honourable in part. In like manner there is no genius who is not also a fool, and no fool who is not also a genius.

Sexes make no Difference; since in Souls there is none: And they are the Subjects of Friendship.

Sincerity is the highest complement you can pay.

Wisdom is better than silver and gold. I was hopeless, now I’m on hope road.

All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

If you shoot at a king you must kill him.