Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to it.

The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Our best thoughts come from others.

Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

There are no have-to’s, just choices.

Knowledge exists to be imparted.

He has been a doctor a year now and has had two patients, no, three, I think – yes, it was three; I attended their funerals.

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality.

Virtue has never been as respectable as money.

The sun is but a morning star.

Who shall set a limit to the influence of a human being?

I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.

No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned… a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.

October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.

He liked to like people, therefore people liked him.

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.

It is the nature of babies to be in bliss.