Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

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.

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.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.

Great people are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.

Let us then try what love can do to mend a broken world.

I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars.

As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent.

A graceful and pleasing figure is a perpetual letter of recommendation.

The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right.

If you are in a poker game and after 20 minutes you don’t know who the patsy is, then you’re the patsy.

Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans –which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.

Of all the anti-social vested interests the worst is the vested interest in ill-health.

People wish to be settled. It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

If you have nothing to say, say nothing.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

America is another name for opportunity.

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