Ralph Waldo Emerson

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself.

The city is recruited from the country.

Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

If you try to please everybody, somebody’s not going to like it.

No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.

We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.

No two on earth in all things can agree. All have some daring singularity.

Fame is proof that the people are gullible.

Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.

Life is short, but there is always time for courtesy.

Man is the only creature who has a nasty mind.