Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will or against his will he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a threadball thrown at a mark, but the other end remains on the thrower.

The basis of good manners is self-reliance.

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

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.

He’s a man of great common sense and good taste – meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

Perhaps his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in.

The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom.

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

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature.

We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together, and if we are to live together we have to talk.

I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.

You can never really live anyone else’s life, not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you’ve become yourself.

Them meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.