Ralph Waldo Emerson

Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.

No orator can top the one who can give good nicknames.

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all the management of human affairs.

As soon as there is life there is danger.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for competitors.

Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.

If in doubt, don’t. If still in doubt, do what’s right.

In fine, he that is drunk is not a Man: Because he is so long void of Reason, that distinguishes a Man from a Beast.

I am who I am today because of the choices I made yesterday.

Labor diligently to increase your property.

There is nothing you can say in answer to a compliment. I have been complimented myself a great many times, and they always embarrass me-I always feel that they have not said enough.

Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.

I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

Only a man’s character is the real criterion of worth.

Haven’t you learned yet that I put something more than whisky into my speeches.

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; for causes which are unpenetrated.

The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people but if we tried to shut up the insane we would run out of building materials.

A strenuous soul hates cheap success.

I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.