Ralph Waldo Emerson

Be an opener of doors.

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.

The laws of each are convertible into the laws of any other.

When we quarrel, how we wish we had been blameless.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

We are wiser than we know.

To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they know quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?

Some men do as much begrudge others a good name, as they want one themselves: and perhaps that is the reason of it.

Whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it.

Is not every man sometimes a radical in politics? Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick, or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused; when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.

Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity, and beauty as conspicuously as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness, and ugliness.

One of the lessons that I grew up with was to always stay true to yourself, and never let what somebody else says distract you from your goals.

Most people think that aging is irreversible and we know that there are mechanisms even in the human machinery that allow for the reversal of aging, through correction of diet, through anti-oxidants, through removal of toxins from the body, through exercise, through yoga and breathing techniques, and through meditation.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

The jealous are troublesome to others, but a torment to themselves.

I am neither of the East nor of the West, no boundaries exist within my breast.

If you weren’t such a great man, you’d be a terrible bore.

To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

Sexes make no Difference; since in Souls there is none: And they are the Subjects of Friendship.

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.