Ralph Waldo Emerson

Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men – that is genius.

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

It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune, and when you have it, it requires ten times as much skill to keep it.

There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace, and not pollute the morning.

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.

There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.

There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness.

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

Think ahead. Don’t let day-to-day operations drive out planning.

The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology.

The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.

Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.

The sovereign is called a tyrant who knows no laws but his caprice.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

How can they expect a harvest of thought who have not had the seed time of character.

He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world.

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.

Let him that would move the world, first move himself.

I’ll tell you why yes, because why people lie is, because when people stop lying you know they’ve stopped caring.