Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.

The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness.

For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?

There is this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means; draw it all out, and hold him to it.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?

There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.

But real action is in silent moments. The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our choice of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and the like, but in a silent thought by the wayside as we walk; in a thought which revises our entire manner of life, and says.

We rail at trade, but the historian of the world will see that it was the principle of liberty; that it settled America, and destroyed feudalism, and made peace and keeps peace; that it will abolish slavery.

Have good trust in yourself … not in the One that you think you should be, but in the One that you are.

Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.

If you are good, life is good.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.

Let us my friends snatch our opportunity from the passing day.

I never think at all when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them both well.

Oftentimes, it’s the way we react to change that is the thing that determines the overall experience.

Only the traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better.

The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

He that will enjoy the brightness of sunshine, must quit the coolness of the shade.