Ralph Waldo Emerson

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

The measure of a great leader, is their success in bringing everyone around to their opinion twenty years later.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.

In failing circumstances no one can be relied on to keep their integrity.

The city is recruited from the country.

You can never really live anyone else’s life, not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you’ve become yourself.

Every burned book enlightens the world.

I think if we go back and check our record, the Negro has proven beyond a doubt that we have been more than patient in seeking our rights as American citizens.

I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.

Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers but dress in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.

The liar’s punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.

Nature… She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.

A am a great friend of public amusements, they keep people from vice.

The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.

Every great man, every successful man, no matter what the field of endeavor, has known the magic that lies in these words: every adversity has the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit.

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.