Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man’s style is his mind’s voice. Wooden minds, wooden voices.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.

Society is a hospital of incurables.

Fear always springs from ignorance.

The first thing a great person does, is make us realize the insignificance of circumstance.

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

Passion is a sort of fever in the mind, which ever leaves us weaker than it found us.

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.

Society therefore is an ancient as the world.

Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.

You will know (the good from the bad) when you are calm, at peace. Passive.

There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness.

To be in time is to be asleep: to be awake is to be in eternity.

The power of man has grown in every sphere, except over himself.

Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.