Ralph Waldo Emerson

A true friend is somebody who can make us do what we can.

The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature.

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.

A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.

Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

How we glow over these novels of passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover.

For too long I have silenced my heart, that now, when I give it the opportunity to speak, it no longer remembers its voice. Locked away, it forgot what it’s like to be free; to roam. Imprisoned within loneliness, I fear Stockholm syndrome has developed.

There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles… but there is one order of beauty which seems made to turn the heads not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief -a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavor to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

Be not simply good – be good for something.

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light.

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.

In a dark place we find ourselves, and a little more knowledge lights our way.

If thou wouldn’t conquer thy weakness thou must not gratify it.