Ralph Waldo Emerson

Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.

I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?

As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.

God enters by a private door into every individual.

Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.

Whenever, therefore, people are deceived and form opinions wide of the truth, it is clear that the error has slid into their minds through the medium of certain resemblances to that truth.

They are not only idle who do nothing, but they are idle also who might be better employed.

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

To be a man’s own fool is bad enough, but the vain man is everybody’s.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

Why harass with eternal purposes a mind to weak to grasp them?

The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.

Sad people dislike the happy, and the happy the sad; the quick thinking the sedate, and the careless the busy and industrious.

The most dangerous thing is illusion.

Make a good use of the present.

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.

Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.

We are stripped bare by the curse of plenty.

Compound for sins they are inclined to by damning those they have no mind to.

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.