Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

Half a man’s wisdom goes with his courage.

Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding.

The first wealth is health.

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

I could never be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing about the origin and destiny of cats?

It is the false shame of fools to try to conceal wounds that have not healed.

Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world – and never will.

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.

Men have become the tools of their trade.

Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race – the individual’s distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety’s or comfort’s sake, to stand well in his neighbor’s eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions.

Big doors swing on little hinges.

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.

Life will not bear refinement. You must do as other people do.

If you lose money you lose much, If you lose friends you lose more, If you lose faith you lose all.

What drives me to be who I am, to do all that I do, is not what words will be engraved for my epitaph. What drives me to be who I am, to do what I do, is not vanity, is not for adulation in the eyes of others. What drives me is my own desire to be better; to be happy. When I am dead and buried, the words above will not bring me back to life, I choose to live out my epitaph, and not just for it to be a collection of words someone has chosen to define me.

We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.