Ralph Waldo Emerson

But real action is in silent moments. The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our choice of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and the like, but in a silent thought by the wayside as we walk; in a thought which revises our entire manner of life, and says.

The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.

The studious class are their own victims: they are thin and pale, their feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the day a fear of interruption –pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism.

For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?

Life is short, but there is always time for courtesy.

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged.

I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.

Rituals are important. Nowadays it’s hip not to be married. I’m not interested in being hip.

To be a citizen in a democracy, a human being must be given a healthy start.

The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near.

Do what you know and perception is converted into character.

It was his peculiar happiness that he scarcely ever found a stranger whom he did not leave a friend; but it must likewise be added, that he had not often a friend long without obliging him to become a stranger.

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

But you must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know, that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

It’s your life-but only if you make it so.

He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils: for Time is the greatest innovator: and if Time, of course, alter things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?.

Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.