Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

There is always room for a person of force and they make room for many.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Make yourself necessary to somebody.

Valor consists in the power of self recovery.

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.

People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. They prefer suffering that is familiar to the unknown.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

God enters by a private door into every individual.

You who write, choose a subject suited to your abilities and think long and hard on what your powers are equal to and what they are unable to perform.

Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed.

No thought, no reflection, no analysis, no cultivation, no intention; let it settle itself.

I think probably kindness is my number one attribute in a human being. I’ll put it before any of the things like courage or bravery or generosity or anything else.

There is this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means; draw it all out, and hold him to it.

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit – not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviate from their graves.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

When you know better you do better.

We are wiser than we know.

It was his peculiar happiness that he scarcely ever found a stranger whom he did not leave a friend; but it must likewise be added, that he had not often a friend long without obliging him to become a stranger.