Ralph Waldo Emerson

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Wouldst thou shut up the avenues of ill, Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

The only thing grief as taught me is to know how shallow it is.

When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.

Do or do not. There is no try.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

If we don’t occupy ourself with everything, then peaceful mind will have nowhere to abide.

How earthy old people become moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets.

The people are to be taken in small doses.

I only desire sincere relations with the worthiest of my acquaintance, that they may give me an opportunity once in a year to speak the truth.

Ask counsel of both timesof the ancient time what is best, and of the latter time what is fittest.

Blows are sarcasm’s turned stupid.

A short letter to a distant friend is, in my opinion, an insult like that of a slight bow or cursory salutation — a proof of unwillingness to do much, even where there is a necessity of doing something.

We have reached a point today where labor-saving devices are good only when they do not throw the worker out of his job.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

Make a good use of the present.

All professions are conspiracies against the laity.