Ralph Waldo Emerson

A sect or party is an incognito devised to save man from the vexation of thinking.

At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

All diseases run into one, old age.

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.

My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

A good and faithful judge ever prefers the honorable to the expedient.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.

This comes of James teaching me to think for myself, and never to hold back out of fear of what other people may think of me. It works beautifully as long as I think the same things as he does.

It is only through labour and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage; that we move on to better things.

Only in the darkness can you see the stars.

We are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspected.

Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.

Give me beauty in the inward soul; may the outward and the inward man be at one.

Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.

The eye is easily frightened.

You live longer once you realize that any time spent being unhappy is wasted.

The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.

I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make that man another you. One’s enough.