Ralph Waldo Emerson

Society is a hospital of incurables.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

To fill the hour – that is happiness.

The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.

Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.

Gross and obscure natures, however decorated, seem impure shambles; but character gives splendor to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and gray hairs.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

Go into the street, and give one man a lecture on morality, and another a shilling, and see which will respect you most.

Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be.

Cultivate kindness today and always.

Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.

There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it.

Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here.

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn’t got any.

I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous. And therefore I bid farewell to all this; the common opinion is enough for me. For, as I was saying, I want to know not about this, but about myself: am I a monster more complicated and swollen with passion than the serpent Typho, or a creature of a gentler and simpler sort, to whom Nature has given a diviner and lowlier destiny?

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles with it.

The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed, there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennui s, vanish, all duties even.