Ralph Waldo Emerson

Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

What a new face courage puts on everything!

The most dangerous thing is illusion.

Do the thing we fear, and the death of fear is certain.

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.

The greatest homage we can pay truth is to use it.

Excess in Apparel is another costly Folly. The very Trimming of the vain World would cloath all the naked one.

Do not do to others what angers you if done to you by others.

Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on The Survival of the Fittest. These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.

Well, dinner would have been splendid!

A wise neuter joins with neither, but uses both as his honest interest leads him.

How earthy old people become moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets.

The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.

I’m not denyin’ the women are foolish. God Almighty made ’em to match the men.

We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade?

The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.

Rich men without convictions are more dangerous in modern society than poor women without chastity.

I recall a most ingenious piece in a Wisconsin quarterly some years ago in which ‘The Recognitions’ ’ debt to ‘Ulysses’ was established in such minute detail I was doubtful of my own firm recollection of never having read ‘Ulysses.

Higher than the question of our duration is the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he would be a great soul in future must be a great soul now.

Every old poem is sacred.

In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it’s more dangerous to lose than to win.