Ralph Waldo Emerson

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

Beauty without expression is boring.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

Men are what their mothers made them.

The majority have no other reason for their opinions than that they are the fashion.

The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

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.

He is rich who is content with the least; for contentment is the wealth of nature.

Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness, — whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so.

A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.

I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

Train hard, turn up, run your best and the rest will take care of itself.

A sect or party is an incognito devised to save man from the vexation of thinking.

Is not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily pad floating on the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every shrub and tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit.

What could we accomplish if we knew we could not fail?

There is this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means; draw it all out, and hold him to it.

The way by which you may get money almost without exception leads downward.

We are not victims of aging, sickness and death. These are part of scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of change. This seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being.