Ralph Waldo Emerson

My chief want in life is someone who shall make me do what I can.

We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves…

I pay the schoolmaster, but it is the school boys who educate my son.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with celestial air, until it eclipses the sun and moon.

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

We have a problem. Congratulations. But it’s a tough problem. Then double congratulations.

A true friend freely, advises justly, assists readily, adventures boldly, takes all patiently, defends courageously, and continues a friend unchangeably.

Every man passes his life in the search after friendship.

Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts.

There is only one good – knowledge; and only one evil – ignorance.

While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God’s creation.

There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.

Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice.

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

The painters could be identified by dirty fingernails; the writers by conversation in labored monosyllables and aggressive vulgarities which disguised their minds.

The true poem is the poet’s mind.

A physician’s physiology has much the same relation to his power of healing as a cleric’s divinity has to his power of influencing conduct.

To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature Congressman.

To hazard much to get much has more of avarice than wisdom.