Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men love to wonder and that is the seed of our science.

Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.

There is always a best way of doing everything.

We do what we must, and call it by the best names.

Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.

Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.

Higher than the question of our duration is the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he would be a great soul in future must be a great soul now.

Responsibilities are given to him on whom trust rests. Responsibility is always a sign of trust.

The world is its own magic.

That after an hour’s silence he can say, The one thing I cannot stand is dampness… That’s all, it took him an hour to work that out.

We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.

I hold every man a debtor to his profession.

A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written. Everyday would make a whole book of 80,000 words – 365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man – the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

I believe that he was really sorry that people would not believe he was sorry that he was not more sorry.

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

Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present.

If you wish me to weep, you must first show grief yourself.

It is better that some should be unhappy than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.