Ralph Waldo Emerson

As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, What it will do with you?

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.

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

Truth is the summit of being justice is the application of it to affairs.

Obscurity and competence: That is the life that is worth living.

Be like a tree and let the dead leaves drop.

When you introduce a moral lesson, let it be brief.

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.

Humanity has unquestionably one really effective weapon

The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.

The man is either mad, or he is making verses.

Writers are the engineers of human souls.

Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air. It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog’s life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.

I am not bound over to swear allegiance to any master; where the storm drives me I turn in for shelter.

The fortune which nobody sees makes a person happy and unenvied.

People die of fright and live of confidence.

No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.