Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

God screens us evermore from premature ideas.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.

Some desire is necessary to keep life in motion, and he whose real wants are supplied must admit those of fancy.

Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.

I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

The envious man grows lean at the success of his neighbor.

Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.

Extended empires are like expanded gold, exchanging solid strength for feeble splendor.

It takes two to speak truth – one to speak, and another to hear.

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

We are chameleons, and our partialities and prejudices change place with an easy and blessed facility, and we are soon wonted to the change and happy in it.

Fortune knocks at every man’s door once in a life, but in a good many cases the man is in a neighboring saloon and does not hear her.

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.