Ralph Waldo Emerson

The best efforts of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.

To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs.

A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

Can anybody remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?

We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.

The desire of excessive power caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge caused men to fall.

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

Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means – one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.

If you have nothing to say, say nothing.

It is possible to be free and loving no matter what your circumstances.

We are apt to love praise, but not deserve it. But if we would deserve it, we must love virtue more than that.

He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils: for Time is the greatest innovator: and if Time, of course, alter things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?.

Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.

We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life — some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed — because all their teaching has been, that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this defense against passionate affliction even more than men.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth into a liar – that I call an achievement.

Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled.