Ralph Waldo Emerson

The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so; but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger, and mosquitoes and silly people.

In nature nothing can be given. All things are sold.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.

No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.

Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.

It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.

One little bird not larger than a sparrow, it may have been a Phalarope, would alight on the turbulent surface where the breakers were five or six feet high, and float buoyantly there like a duck, cunningly taking to its wings and lifting itself a few feet through the air over the foaming crest of each breaker, but sometimes outriding safely a considerable billow which hid it some seconds, when its instinct told it that it would not break. It was a little creature thus to sport with the ocean, but it was as perfect a success in its way as the breakers in theirs.

When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself.

The fortune which nobody sees makes a person happy and unenvied.

Something made greater by ourselves and in turn that makes us greater.

What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so much we are.

Self-suggestion makes you master of yourself.

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.

The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes a low business-tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact. He calls his employment by its lowest name, and so takes from evil tongues their sharpest weapon. His conversation clings to the weather and the news, yet he allows himself to be surprised into thought, and the unlocking of his learning and philosophy.

Words are but the signs of ideas.

It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like as long as somebody loves you.

If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.

Man is the only creature who has a nasty mind.

The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.

So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.