Ralph Waldo Emerson

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.

The soul’s emphasis is always right.

We are prisoners of ideas.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.

Necessity does everything well.

A man in debt is so far a slave.

Our spontaneous action is always the best. You cannot, with your best deliberation and heed, come so close to any question as your spontaneous glance shall bring you.

We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are the richest.

The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.

The more I see the less I know for sure.

Unconsciously we all have a standard by which we measure other men, and if we examine closely we find that this standard is a very simple one, and is this: we admire them, we envy them, for great qualities we ourselves lack. Hero worship consists in just that. Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do. We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.

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.

That which we do not believe, we cannot adequately say; even though we may repeat the words ever so often.

Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion.

Don’t think of yourself as indispensable or infallible. As Charles De Gaulle said, the cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.

If you develop rules, never have more than ten.

We live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and I think we thus lose some respect for one another.

Does he council you better who bids you, Money, by right means, if you can: but by any means, make money?