Ralph Waldo Emerson

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

But you must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know, that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.

Every great achievement is the victory of a flaming heart.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the book-worm.

Be like a tree and let the dead leaves drop.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

When I feel like dancing, I dance. I don’t care if anyone else is dancing or if everyone else is laughing at me. I dance.

Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.

We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us.

Power doesn’t corrupt people; people corrupt power.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

I do not hold that we should rearm in order to fight. I hold that we should rearm in order to parley.

Do not assume anything. Clear your mind must be if you are to discover the real villains behind this plot.

Pity the man who has a character to support – it is worse than a large family – he is silent poor indeed.

One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within and available to you now.

Love is the hardest lesson in Christianity; but, for that reason, it should be most our care to learn it.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

I never think at all when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them both well.