Ralph Waldo Emerson

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.

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.

Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters.

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

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

Suspicion amongst thoughts are like bats amongst birds, they never fly by twilight.

When you’re first figuring yourself out, you care so much about what people think of you.

People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.

We are just statistics, born to consume resources.

The more I see the less I know for sure.

It is not where you start but how high you aim that matters for success.

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it – and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again – and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.

Temperate temperance is best; intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance.

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.

Be like a tree and let the dead leaves drop.

All wonder is the effect of novelty on ignorance.

See, I think you live on earth a certain number of times until you finish what it is that you were meant to do here. And then you go on. I don’t think I’ll be back here. I think I’m done.

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

He who is upright in his way of life and free from sin.