Ralph Waldo Emerson

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.

Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today.

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.

Fear always springs from ignorance.

Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.

The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

How can what an Englishman believes be hearsay? It is a contradiction in terms.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

The superfluous, a very necessary thing.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

Silence is the virtue of fools.

A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavor to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures.

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.

Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.

We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

I was not a messiah, but an ordinary man who had become a leader because of extraordinary circumstances.

The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.

I’m out there to clean the plate. Once they’ve read what I’ve written on a subject, I want them to think, ‘That’s it!’ I think the highest aspiration people in our trade can have is that once they’ve written a story, nobody will ever try it again.

Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged, must end in disappointment. If it be asked, what is the improper expectation which it is dangerous to indulge, experience will quickly answer, that it is such expectation as is dictated not by reason, but by desire; expectation raised, not by the common occurrences of life, but by the wants of the expectant; an expectation that requires the common course of things to be changed, and the general rules of action to be broken.