Ralph Waldo Emerson

Most of the shadows of life are caused by standing in our own sunshine.

The true artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

The man who can make hard things easy is the educator.

These times of ours are serious and full of calamity, but all times are essentially alike. As soon as there is life there is danger.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.

There are innumerable questions to which the inquisitive mind can in this state receive no answer: Why do you and I exist? Why was this world created? Since it was to be created, why was it not created sooner?

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

We mustn’t be stiff and stand-off, you know. We must be thoroughly democratic, and patronize everybody without distinction of class.

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

Be a rainbow in someone else’s cloud.

The report of my death was an exaggeration.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

The holy passion of friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.

If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.