Ralph Waldo Emerson

Stay at home in your mind. Don’t recite other people’s opinions. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Life is a festival only to the wise.

People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.

All that I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

Them meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.

Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge.

One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.

The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen’s miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.

We must set up a strong present tense against all rumors of wrath, past and to come.

Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he does not.

No two on earth in all things can agree. All have some daring singularity.

If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life.

Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

Without friends the world is but a wilderness. There is no man that imparteth his joys to his friends, but he joyeth the more; and no man that imparteth his grieves to his friend, but he grieveth the less.

One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards.