Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper.

Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

We must be our own before we can be another’s.

The masses have no habit of self reliance or original action.

The secret of culture is to learn, that a few great points steadily reappear.

Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

It is your concern when your neighbor’s wall is on fire.

I was brought up to hate and fear liberty. I came to love it. That is the secret of my whole career.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.

All men make mistakes, but only wise men learn from their mistakes.

Men know that women are an over-match for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.

All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of story-tellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.

The need for change bulldozed road down the center of my mind.

A picture is a poem without words.

The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day.

Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget…

It is your character, and your character alone, that will make your life happy or unhappy.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.