Ralph Waldo Emerson

Happiness is a perfume which you cannot pour on someone without getting some on yourself.

Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

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.

If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply, the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential.

That which builds is better than that which is built.

There is a hush over all Europe, nay, over all the world. Alas! it is the hush of suspense, and in many lands it is the hush of fear. Listen! No, listen carefully, I think I hear somethingyes, there it was quite clear. Dont you hear it? It is the tramp of armies crunching the gravel of the paradegrounds, splashing through rain-soaked fields, the tramp of two million German soldiers and more than a million Italiansgoing on maneuversyes, only on maneuvers!

It is easy – terribly easy – to shake a man’s faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man’s spirit is devil’s work.

If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.

It is nobler to be good, and it is nobler to teach others to be good – and less trouble!

I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.

One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

Repartee is something we think of twenty-four hours too late.

Sir, I have found you an argument. I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

Are you using your pain as an excuse or as a source of strength?

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.

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

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.

Often a certain abdication of prudence and foresight is an element of success.