Ralph Waldo Emerson

Religion is as effectually destroyed by bigotry as by indifference.

He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds.

It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him.

Thought makes every thing fit for use.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing –to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

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.

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Follow your own passion – not your parents’, not your teachers’- yours.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

I answer the heroic question Death where is thy sting? It is here in my heart and mind and memories

Drag your thoughts away from your troubles… by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.

Fatigue makes cowards of us all.

You will have bad times, but they will always wake you up to the stuff you weren’t paying attention to.

I mean why should somebody go steal and break the law to get all they can when there’s always some law where you can be legal and get it all anyway!

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.

Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.

Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.

That observation which is called knowledge of the world will be found much more frequently to make men cunning than good.

A fly may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.