Ralph Waldo Emerson

The next best thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one.

We are prisoners of ideas.

Men are what their mothers made them.

As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.

All mankind love a lover.

All that I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

Do you know that the tendrils of graft and corruption have become mighty interlacing roots so that even men who would like to be honest are tripped and trapped by them?

One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen’s miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.

We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead and not in our lifetime.

Being is the great explainer.

He is great who confers the most benefits.

Sir, I have no objection to a man’s drinking wine, if he can do it in moderation. I found myself apt to go to excess in it, and therefore, after having been for some time without it, on account of illness, I thought it better not to return to it. Every man is to judge for himself, according to the effects which he experiences.

Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?

I know of no such unquestionable badge and ensign of a sovereign mind as that of tenacity of purpose.

Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses.

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected