Ralph Waldo Emerson

The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic also.

Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character.

The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.

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

The people are to be taken in small doses.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

A lucky person gets up in the morning, puts both feet on the floor, knows what they’re about to do and thinks it still matters.

The desire of excessive power caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge caused men to fall.

A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.

Technique is noticed most markedly in the case of those who have not mastered it.

Never marry but for love; but see that thou lovest what is lovely.

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

It’s your life-but only if you make it so.

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: “O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.” And God granted it.

With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.

Men are generally more careful of the breed of their horses and dogs than of their children.

Real practice has no purpose or direction, so it can include everything that comes.