Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.

Do the thing we fear, and the death of fear is certain.

The reward of a thing well done is having done it.

Read not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, not to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

To have a great man for a friend seems pleasant to those who have never tried it; those who have, fear it.

To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know, I’ve done it a thousand times.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

Danger – if you meet it promptly and without flinching – you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!

You must avoid sloth, that wicked siren.

Everything that enlarges the sphere of human powers, that shows man he can do what he thought he could not do, is valuable.

Patience makes lighter What sorrow may not heal.

When a man laughs at his troubles he loses a great many friends. They never forgive the loss of their prerogative.

A Judge may be a farmer; but he is not to geld his own pigs. A Judge may play a little at cards for his own amusement; but he is not to play at marbles, or chuck farthing in the Piazza.

I never could keep a promise. I do not blame myself for this weakness, because the fault must lie in my physical organization. It is likely that such a very liberal amount of space was given to the organ which enables me to make promises that the organ which should enable me to keep them was crowded out. But I grieve not. I like no half-way things. I had rather have one faculty nobly developed than two faculties of mere ordinary capacity.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

The habit of looking on the best side of every event is worth more than a thousand pounds a years.

Nothing is more common than mutual dislike, where mutual approbation is particularly expected.