Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot.

Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.

I find that the Americans have no passions, they have appetites.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

Life consists in what a person is thinking of all day.

The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

The world will only, in the end, follow those who have despised as well as served it.

Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter.

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.

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

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author’s own life into them.

The truest end of life is to know that life never ends.

The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.

Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.

…with the black marble which gives the fireplace the air of a miniature family vault, to suggest early Victorian commercial respectability, belief in money, Bible fetichism, fear of hell always at war with fear of poverty, instinctive horror of the passionate character of art, love and Roman Catholic religion, and all the first fruits of plutocracy in the early generations of the industrial revolution.

I have been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who get drunk.

No one ever became great by imitation.

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

It’s so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don’t say it.