Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men who for truth and honor’s sake stand fast and suffer long. Brave men who work while others sleep. Who dare while others fly.They build a nation’s pillars deep. And lift them to the sky.

If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply, the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential.

Mr. Emerson visited Thoreau at the jail, and the meeting between the two philosophers must have been interesting and somewhat dramatic. The account of the meeting was told me by Miss Maria Thoreau Henry Thoreaus auntHenry, why are you here? Waldo, why are you not here?

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — `Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

To fill the hour – that is happiness.

Men are what their mothers made them.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

All successful men have agreed in one thing – they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things.

The envious man grows lean at the success of his neighbor.

A great man is always willing to be little.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.

The trouble with you Chicago people is that you think you are the best people down here, whereas you are merely the most numerous.

Loyalty is still the same, whether it win or lose the game; true as a dial to the sun, although it be not shined upon.

The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man’s most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

Who prays for Satan? Who, in 1,800 years, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

What I mean is you make the world less ugly just by living in it.

If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.