Ralph Waldo Emerson

Self-sacrifice is the real miracle out of which all the reported miracles grow.

A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts.

My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock should find the time in my face.

Children are all foreigners.

Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.

Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.

They that have grown old in a single state are generally found to be morose, fretful and captious; tenacious of their own practices and maxims; soon offended by contradiction or negligence; and impatient of any association but with those that will watch their nod, and submit themselves to unlimited authority.

It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.

What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?

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

The eagle has ceased to scream, but the parrots will now begin to chatter. The war of the giants is over and the pigmies will now start to squabble.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

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 censorships. There is the whole case against censorships in a nutshell.

Burning logs can carry on quite a conversation! … Have you ever heard apple wood talking? It’s the most loquacious of all. You really can’t get a word in edgeways.

Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.

Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.

A banker is a fellow who lends his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

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

Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender.

Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.