Ralph Waldo Emerson

He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others.

Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of the pleasure that concealed it.

We aim above the mark to hit the mark.

Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.

As soon as there is life there is danger.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

It happened once that a youth and a maiden beheld each other in a public assembly for the first time

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.

The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions.

The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.

Moral of the Work. In war: resolution. In defeat: defiance. In victory: magnanimity. In peace: goodwill.

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

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.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

If a diplomat says yes, he means perhaps. If he says perhaps he means no. And if he says no, he’s the hell of a diplomat.

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

The seven deadly sins… food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man’s neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted.

One wanders to the left, another to the right. Both are equally in error, but, are seduced by different delusions.