Ralph Waldo Emerson

We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade?

A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

Do not tell me of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.

The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

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.

Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.

Men love to wonder and that is the seed of our science.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.

When the desire ain’t on me I don’t need help. When it is on me I don’t want any. See? Like the old fellah that never mended his roof. Said on a wet day he couldn’t do it and on a dry day it was as good as anybody’s.

Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover.

It is a happy talent to know how to play.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.

What right have I to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder?

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn’t got any.

There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought -a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

We must have infinite faith in each other. If we have not, we must never let it leak out that we have not.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.