Ralph Waldo Emerson

The masses have no habit of self reliance or original action.

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

What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.

The city is recruited from the country.

Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol and an audience is electrified.

Sorrow makes us children again.

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

When the righteous man truth away from his righteousness that he hath committed and doeth that which is neither quite lawful nor quite right, he will generally be found to have gained in amiability what he has lost in holiness.

When a man is just and firm in his purpose, the citizens burning to approve a wrong or the frowning looks of a tyrant. Do not shake his fixed mind, nor the Southwind. Wild lord of the uneasy Adriatic, nor the thunder in the mighty hand of Jove: Should the heavens crack and tumble down, as the ruins crushed him he would not fear.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it….

Shame arises from the fear of men, conscience from the fear of God.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

To be a man’s own fool is bad enough, but the vain man is everybody’s.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.

No orator can top the one who can give good nicknames.

The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.