Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.

Self-command is the main discipline.

Do what we can, summer will have its flies.

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

Some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise.

Work and thou canst escape the reward; whether the work be fine or course, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought.

I refused to attend his funeral. But I wrote a very nice letter explaining that I approved of it.

In the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.

Once I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: No good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.

Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.

You’ve got to have a good spirit on the inside. That’s what’s really going to make you look like you’re ready to rock the world.

Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.

If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

Though wisdom cannot be gotten for gold, still less can be gotten without it.

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them.

Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.

Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.

You must learn to drink the cup of life as it comes … without stirring it up from the bottom. That’s where the bitter dregs are!

Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual.