Ralph Waldo Emerson

One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

The true poem is the poet’s mind.

The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.

There are three wants which never can be satisfied: that of the rich, who wants something more; that of the sick, who wants something different; and that of the traveler, who says, Anywhere but here.

Of all debts men are least willing to pay the taxes. What a satire is this on government! Everywhere they think they get their moneys worth, except for these.

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.

When things are steep, remember to stay level-headed.

It is vain for the coward to flee; death follows close behind; it is only by defying it that the brave escape.

It took me twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public.

Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the airplane, the pessimist the parachute.

Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing.

What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness.

The ancients recommended us to sacrifice to the Graces, but Milton sacrificed to the Devil.

The best armor is to keep out of gunshot.

Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again. The world is not yet exhausted; let me see something tomorrow which I never saw before.

And deep in my heart. The answer, it was in me. And I made up my mind. To define my own destiny.

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.