Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men’s minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.

Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.

The studious class are their own victims: they are thin and pale, their feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the day a fear of interruption –pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism.

We have more than we use.

He who is taught to live upon little owes more to his father’s wisdom than he who has a great deal left him does to his father’s care.

The wretched have no compassion, they can do good only from strong principles of duty.

Life is largely a matter of expectation.

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

We are ashamed of our thoughts and often see them brought forth by others.

Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.

If a diplomat says yes, he means perhaps. If he says perhaps he means no. And if he says no, he’s the hell of a diplomat.

Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.

The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder – in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.

I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

A bargain is something you can’t use at a price you can’t resist.