Ralph Waldo Emerson

The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.

The only sin that we never forgive in each other is a difference in opinion.

A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat; self-control is the rule.

A few strong instincts and a few plain rules suffice us.

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.

Images also help me find and realise ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people

Knowledge always demands increase; it is like fire, which must first be kindled by some external agent, but will afterwards always propagate itself.

Silence is the virtue of fools.

The key to every man is his thought. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option.

I do not like work even when someone else does it.

Your dreams may have shattered, but that doesn’t mean they are over. They can still be turned into a mosaic of success.

Whatever you have spend less.

What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

He who learns but does not think is lost. He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.

There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman for ever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer –committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.

Possession isn’t nine-tenths of the law. It’s nine-tenths of the problem.

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.