Ralph Waldo Emerson

We judge of man’s wisdom by his hope.

O friend, never strike sail to a fear! Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.

Sincerity is the highest complement you can pay.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.

It is by the goodness of God that we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

There are two great rules of life, the one general and the other particular. The first is that everyone can, in the end get what he wants if he only tries. This is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is more or less an exception to the general rule.

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

The secret in education lies in respecting the student.

The more you know the less you understand.

He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.

It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances.

Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still.

Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed.

I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.

You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.

An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

To choose time is to save time.