Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?

Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters.

Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.

What is peculiar in the life of a man consists not in his obedience, but his opposition, to his instincts. In one direction or another he strives to live a supernatural life.

A private Life is to be preferred; the Honor and Gain of publick Posts, bearing no proportion with the Comfort of it

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

My finger can point to the moon, but my finger is not the moon. You don’t have to become my finger, nor do you have to worship my finger. You have to forget my finger, and look at where it is pointing.

Very often, say what you will, a knave is only a fool.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course.

If you weren’t such a great man, you’d be a terrible bore.

Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.

He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity. The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it.

Everyone has the right to be stupid on occasion, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege.

If it be an evil to judge rashly or untruly any single man, how much a greater sin it is to condemn a whole people.

Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it.