Ralph Waldo Emerson

The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. He is the world’s eye.

The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

If a man sits down to think, he is immediately asked if has a headache.

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.

Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

If you learn to practice love, compassion, joy, and equanimity, you will know how to heal the illnesses of anger, sorrow, insecurity, sadness, hatred, loneliness, and unhealthy attachments.

I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.

Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has repressed. It only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.

The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper.

Excellence must be pursued, it must be wooed with all of one’s might and every bit of effort that we have each day there’s a new encounter, each week is a new challenge.

Discord is the great ill of mankind; and tolerance is the only remedy for it.

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.