Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly-full of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.

But you must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know, that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.

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.

We do what we must, and call it by the best names.

The only gift is a portion of thyself.

Syllables govern the world.

I see the whole concept of Generation X implies that everyone has lost hope.

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing, he knew nobody had said it before.

There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.

Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority: men please themselves with imagining that they have made a deeper search, or wider survey than others, and detected faults and follies which escape vulgar observation.

A true friend freely, advises justly, assists readily, adventures boldly, takes all patiently, defends courageously, and continues a friend unchangeably.

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.

The first wealth is health.

Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.

The virtue in most request is conformity.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

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.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.