Ralph Waldo Emerson

The surest poison is time.

Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.

There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.

Fear always springs from ignorance.

Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect.

There is properly no history; only biography.

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him to the public.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

An autobiography is not about pictures; it’s about the stories; it’s about honesty and as much truth as you can tell without coming too close to other people’s privacy.

There are books which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Why not blame the libraries? They’re full of violent books.