Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are as much informed of a writer’s genius by what he selects as by what he originates.

Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.

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

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.

Blame is safer than praise.

I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.

Do not undervalue the headache. While it is at its sharpest it seems a bad investment; but when relief begins, the unexpired remainder is worth $4 a minute.

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice.

Old men are dangerous: it doesn’t matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.

Patience makes lighter What sorrow may not heal.

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.

Might, could, would – they are contemptible auxiliaries.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

Say a word, say a thousand to me on the telephone and I shall choose the wrong one to cling to as though you had said it after long deliberation when only I provoked it from you, I will cling to it from among a thousand, to be provoked and hurl it back with something I mean no more than you meant that, something for you to cling to and retreat clinging to.

Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness, — whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so.

People of great position are servants times three, servants of their country, servants of fame, and servants of business.

There are goods so opposed that we cannot seize both, but, by too much prudence, may pass between them at too great a distance to reach either.