Ralph Waldo Emerson

The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker upon the planet. Then all things are at risk.

America is another name for opportunity.

Beauty rests on necessities.

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds – not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but – a hatred of all injury.

A woman is a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.

I trust no one, not even myself.

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

To regret deeply is to live afresh.

Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame.

The true poem is the poet’s mind.

The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

It is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

He is rich who is content with the least; for contentment is the wealth of nature.

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.