Ralph Waldo Emerson

Is not every man sometimes a radical in politics? Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick, or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused; when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.

Work and thou canst escape the reward; whether the work be fine or course, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought.

No one has a prosperity so high and firm that two or three words can’t dishearten it.

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.

No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself.

The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.

Seize the day, put no trust in tomorrow. [Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.Lat.]

It’s the ones that stayed after the Exodus, that I knew were real and could handle the truth; that would stay with me on my journey, for better or worse.

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

The Public is merely a multiplied “me”.

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.

What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it, you become its prey.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

We are just statistics, born to consume resources.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.

Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others.

For many years I was a self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully, though I never received payment for it.

People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.

Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding.