Ralph Waldo Emerson

Money is the representative of a certain quantity of corn or other commodity. It is so much warmth, so much bread.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.

Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol and an audience is electrified.

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

The people are to be taken in small doses.

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.

The ship of heaven guides itself and will not accept a wooden rudder.

For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.

It is a brave thing to have courage to be an individual; it is also, perhaps, a lonely thing. But it is better than not being an individual, which is to be nobody at all.

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

You get a reputation for stability if you are stable for years.

Why do you treat me as they do, as though I were exactly what I want to be. Why do we treat people that way?

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.

No matter how much or how little I knew technically, I was able to get the best out of people I worked with.

By indignities men come to dignities.

Death is the king of this world: ‘Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.

No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.

I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.

This gives force to the strong — that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action.