Ralph Waldo Emerson

I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.

Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.

Our faith comes in moments… yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.

Who shall set a limit to the influence of a human being?

Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

I teach that all men are mad.

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

Is not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily pad floating on the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every shrub and tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit.

For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities – a willing movement of a man’s soul with the larger sweep of the world’s forces –a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.

The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call common sense; a man of a strong affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic. There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune in making money. Men talk as if there were some magic about this. He knows that all goes on the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent – for every effect a perfect cause – and that good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.

It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God.

Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.

The purity men love is like the mists which envelope the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.

The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them.

We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.

What you do makes a difference. And you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.

Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.

Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderated use rather than total abstinence.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.