Ralph Waldo Emerson

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the book-worm.

I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot.

Some men are born to own, and can animate all their possessions. Others cannot: their owning is not graceful; seems to be a compromise of their character: they seem to steal their own dividends.

The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know. The persons who compose our company, converse, and come and go, and design and execute many things, and somewhat comes of it all, but an unlooked for result. The individual is always mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors, quarrelled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done; all are a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new, and very unlike what he promised himself.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities.

Would not love see returning penitence afar off, and fall on its neck and kiss it?

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my own constitution; the only wrong what is against it.

For knowledge itself is power.

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

Our country is that spot to which our heart is bound.

Rich men without convictions are more dangerous in modern society than poor women without chastity.

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.

I cannot forgive a scholar his homeless despondency.

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’

She has lost the art of conversation, but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

We live by our imagination, our admirations, and our sentiments.

Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world – and never will.

It is a time when one’s spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.

The self divides into ten billion distinct illuminating spirits. Distinguish these without falling into names and classifications.

I lose my respect for the man who can make the mystery of sex the subject of a coarse jest, yet when you speak earnestly and seriously on the subject, is silent.