Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.

We are wiser than we know.

The man who can make hard things easy is the educator.

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

Virtue has never been as respectable as money.

Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.

Labor diligently to increase your property.

If you are really thankful, what do you do? You share.

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some area of native land where it may get the love of tender kinship from the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead.

The true poem is the poet’s mind.

How great, my friends, is the virtue of living upon a little!

The President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne.

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly-full of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.

I would give all the wealth of the world, and all the deeds of all the heroes, for one true vision.

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

Nothing destroys authority more than the unequal and untimely interchange of power stretched too far and relaxed too much.

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.

I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.

Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged.