Ralph Waldo Emerson

No orator can top the one who can give good nicknames.

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

Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

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

The education of the will is the object of our existence.

Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.

On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there’s any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.

There can be no friendship where there is no freedom. Friendship loves a free air, and will not be fenced up in straight and narrow enclosures.

There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.

We are not won by arguments that we can analyze, but by tone and temper; by the manner, which is the man himself.

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.

Without frugality none can be rich, and with it very few would be poor.

I’m like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he’s cold, and his clothes are torn, and he’s ashamed, but he’s not unhappy.

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.

I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell – you see, I have friends in both places.

Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character.

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.

Common sense is the best distributed thing in the world, for we all think we possess a good share of it.