Ralph Waldo Emerson

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

Adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience.

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.

If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.

Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it.

The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.

It’s a good thing to be foolishly gay once in a while.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

It is proved…that things cannot be other than they are, for since everything was made for a purpose, it follows that everything is made for the best purpose.

I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.

For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.

Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Be present in all things and thankful for all things.

Absolutely speaking, Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you is by no means a golden rule, but the best of current silver. An honest man would have but little occasion for it. It is golden not to have any rule at all in such a case.

I have to live for others and not for myself: that’s middle-class morality.

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.

No comment is a splendid expression. I am using it again and again.

Help a man against his will and you do the same as murder him.