Ralph Waldo Emerson

The course of everything goes to teach us faith.

The secret of culture is to learn, that a few great points steadily reappear.

Raphael paints wisdom; Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.

The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.

Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed.

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

We estimate the wisdom of nations by seeing what they did with their surplus capital.

Really great people make you feel that you, too, can become great.

You will have bad times, but they will always wake you up to the stuff you weren’t paying attention to.

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Silence is not always tact, but it is tact that is golden, not silence.

All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.

People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.

A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman’s life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul’s highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

Pale death with an impartial foot knocks at the hovels of the poor and the palaces of king.

We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.

How could a man be satisfied with a decision between such alternatives and under such circumstances? No more than he can be satisfied with his hat, which he’s chosen from among such shapes as the resources of the age offer him, wearing it at best with a resignation which is chiefly supported by comparison.

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.