Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man’s wife has more power over him than the state has.

No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby-so helpless and so ridiculous.

That which we call sin in others, is experiment for us.

Men lose their tempers in defending their taste.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men’s minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.

We are all alike, on the inside.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.

I look up at the universe and ask, ‘What are you trying to teach me here?’ I know I won’t hear a reply, but asking the question, makes me begin looking for the answer.

For every why he had a wherefore.

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

In the stillness of the mind I saw myself as I am – unbound.

Life will not bear refinement. You must do as other people do.

There is nothing to fear except fear it’s self.

Until we have seen someone’s darkness, we don’t really know who they are. Until we have forgiven someone’s darkness , we don’t really know what love is.

He that has given today may, if he so please, take away tomorrow.

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

Pleasure that is obtained by unreasonable and unsuitable cost, must always end in pain.