Ralph Waldo Emerson

If a man owns land, the land owns him.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.

Sunday is the core of our civilization, dedicated to thought and reverence.

Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.

All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.

We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!

The report of my death was an exaggeration.

Humanity has unquestionably one really effective weapon

I am stronger than my fear.

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

I expect to pass through life but once. If therefore there be any kindness I can show…let me do it now.- William Penn

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

When you cannot get a compliment in any other way pay yourself one.

When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.

All successful men have agreed in one thing – they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things.

It is very easy in the world to live by the opinion of the world. It is very easy in solitude to be self-centered. But the finished man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but religiously follows the new.