Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.

Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration.

Each man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well — he has changed his market-cart into a chariot of the sun.

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.

The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.

Them meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.

What a lot of things there are a man can do without.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

Wake up, you’ve been sleeping. Take up your bed and walk. Stop blaming other people. Oh, it’s nobody else’s fault.

I am not bound over to swear allegiance to any master; where the storm drives me I turn in for shelter.

Nakedness is uncomely, as well in mind as body, and it addeth no small reverence to men’s manners and actions if they be not altogether open. Therefore set it down: That a habit of secrecy is both politic and moral.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Method goes far to prevent trouble in business: for it makes the task easy, hinders confusion, saves abundance of time, and instructs those that have business depending, both what to do and what to hope.

It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‘always do what you are afraid to do.’

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

Punishment closely follows guilt as its companion.

Suspicion amongst thoughts are like bats amongst birds, they never fly by twilight.

A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful-while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.