Ralph Waldo Emerson

Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect.

Give me insight into today and you may have the antique and future worlds.

The key to every man is his thought. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. He is the world’s eye.

The true poem is the poet’s mind.

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

I’m not concerned with your liking or disliking me. All I ask is that you respect me as a human being.

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.

I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.

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?

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

All promise outruns performance.

Be humble. It becomes a creature, a depending and borrowed being, that lives not of itself, but breathes in another’s air with another’s breath, and is accountable for every moment of time and can call nothing its own, but is absolutely a tenant at will of the great Lord of heaven and earth.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

I said there was nothing so convincing to an Indian as a general massacre. If he could not approve of the massacre, I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and education. Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run; because a half-massacred Indian may recover, but if you educate him and wash him, it is bound to finish him some time or other.

The desire of excessive power caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge caused men to fall.