Ralph Waldo Emerson

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.

No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby-so helpless and so ridiculous.

Every man has his own vocation, talent is the call.

Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone.

Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are.

At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

You can never really live anyone else’s life, not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you’ve become yourself.

Every man who attacks my belief, diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy; and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy.

Zeal ever follows an appearance of truth, and the assured are too apt to be warm; but it is their weak side in argument; zeal being better shown against sin than persons, or their mistakes.

He is a modest little man who has a good deal to be modest about.

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?

To succeed in the other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do.

There can be no friendship where there is no freedom. Friendship loves a free air, and will not be fenced up in straight and narrow enclosures.

A good End cannot sanctifie evil Means; nor must we ever do Evil, that Good may come of it. Some Folks think they may Scold, Rail, Hate, Rob and Kill too; so it be but for God’s sake. But nothing in us unlike him, can please him.

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.

Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.

The only sin that we never forgive in each other is a difference in opinion.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.