Ralph Waldo Emerson

These times of ours are serious and full of calamity, but all times are essentially alike. As soon as there is life there is danger.

A man’s personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.

Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.

The State must follow, and not lead, the character and progress of the citizen.

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

For we put the power in the people.

The walking of Man is falling forwards.

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

Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.

I’m just preparing my impromptu remarks.

I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

For too long I have silenced my heart, that now, when I give it the opportunity to speak, it no longer remembers its voice. Locked away, it forgot what it’s like to be free; to roam. Imprisoned within loneliness, I fear Stockholm syndrome has developed.

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another s. We see so much only as we possess.

How we glow over these novels of passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover.

You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.

Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation.