Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who also knows why will always be his boss.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman – repose in energy.

The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

Courage: the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.

No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.

Self-preservation is the first law of nature.

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.

To watch this crystal globe just sent from heaven to associate with me. While these clouds and this somber drizzling weather shut all in, we two draw nearer and know one another. The gathering in of the clouds with the last rush and dying breath of the wind, and then the regular dripping of twigs and leaves the country over, the impression of inward comfort and Sociableness, the drenched stubble and trees that drop beads on you as you pass, their dim outline seen through the rain on all sides drooping in sympathy with yourself. These are my undisputed territory. This is Nature’s English comfort.

Ice-cream is exquisite – what a pity it isn’t illegal.

Where charity keeps pace with grain, industry is blessed, but to slave to get, and keep it sordidly, is a sin against Providence, a vice in government and an injury to their neighbours.

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, to be healthy with physic, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art.

Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.

We carry inside us the wonders we seek outside us.

I only desire sincere relations with the worthiest of my acquaintance, that they may give me an opportunity once in a year to speak the truth.

Anger is a brief lunacy.

The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them.