Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances.

The course of everything goes to teach us faith.

The god of victory is said to be one-handed, but peace gives victory on both sides.

I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot.

Fame is proof that the people are gullible.

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

I was brought up to hate and fear liberty. I came to love it. That is the secret of my whole career.

Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.

It is at our mother’s knee that we acquire our noblest and truest and highest ideals, but there is seldom any money in them.

She has lost the art of conversation, but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

I found you essay to be good and original. However, the part that was original was not good and the part that was good was not original.

Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today.

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.

If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.

I think we foreshorten our own viewpoint if we consider any state of mind, or society, or government as final. Growth and change! We can’t get away from them.

You have such strong words at command, that they make the smallest argument seem formidable.

Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man; but I call him an unsociable man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good.

Attention and respect give pleasure, however late, or however useless. But they are not useless, when they are late, it is reasonable to rejoice, as the day declines, to find that it has been spent with the approbation of mankind.

Do not discourage your children from hoarding, if they have a taste to it; whoever lays up his penny rather than part with it for a cake, at least is not the slave of gross appetite; and shows besides a preference always to be esteemed, of the future to the present moment.

The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.