Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men are respectable only as they respect.

There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace, and not pollute the morning.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

Make yourself necessary to somebody.

God enters by a private door into every individual.

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

The pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

If we had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes.

I always like people who have developed long and hard, particularly through introspection and a lot of dedication. I think that what they arrive at is, usually, deeper and more beautiful than the person who seems to have that ability and fluidity from the beginning.

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

A toddling little girl is a center of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

Water is the only drink for a wise man.

All good things are cheap: all bad are very dear.

Familiarity breeds contempt and children.

We learned about dignity and decency – that how hard you work matters more than how much you make… that helping others means more than just getting ahead yourself.

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.

Be present in all things and thankful for all things.

Philebus was saying that enjoyment and pleasure and delight, and the class of feelings akin to them, are a good to every living being, whereas I contend, that not these, but wisdom and intelligence and memory, and their kindred, right opinion and true reasoning, are better and more desirable than pleasure