Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.

Most of the shadows of life are caused by standing in our own sunshine.

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.

Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself.

The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.

A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those worth committing.

What is easy is seldom excellent.

The thought of two thousand people crunching celery at the same time horrified me.

There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.

Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?

Shame arises from the fear of men, conscience from the fear of God.

Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right; decide on what you think is right and stick to it.

Who ever is out of patience is out of possession of their soul.

Raphael paints wisdom; Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.

You’ll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that. Would Columbus have discovered America if he’d said ‘What if I sink on the way over? What if I meet pirates? What if I never come back?’ He wouldn’t even have started.

Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.

This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.

Any experience of reality is indescribable!

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.

Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, Corn-Pone stands for Self-Approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is Conformity.