Ralph Waldo Emerson

Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness, — whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so.

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.

Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.

Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.

A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

A man’s style is his mind’s voice. Wooden minds, wooden voices.

When you introduce a moral lesson, let it be brief.

Sympathy is a supporting atmosphere, and in it we unfold easily and well.

The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to be governed, but he himself doesn’t want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

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

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.

Speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout.

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

If I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior.

Sure I am of this, that you have only to endure to conquer. You have only to persevere to save yourselves.