Ralph Waldo Emerson

The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.

Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect.

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

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

Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who also knows why will always be his boss.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

Force may make hypocrites, but it can never make converts.

Sweet and glorious it is to die for our country.

Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.

I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have some legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world.

To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.

There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular is providence.

When you ascend the hill of prosperity, may you not meet a friend.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.

We must train hard. It’s not about denying a weakness may exist but about denying its right to persist.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

Covetousness is the greatest of monsters, as well as the root of all evil.