Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations.

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

The secret of culture is to learn, that a few great points steadily reappear.

A man in debt is so far a slave.

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

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.

Fortitude is the marshal of thought, the armor of the will, and the fort of reason.

The faith that stands on authority is not faith.

There must be what Mr. Gladstone many years ago called a blessed act of oblivion. We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.

O Lord, help me not to despise or oppose what I do not understand.

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

It is your character, and your character alone, that will make your life happy or unhappy.

Mountains will go into labour, and a silly little mouse will be born.

It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.

The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.

Each time you learn something new you must readjust the whole framework of your knowledge

The painters could be identified by dirty fingernails; the writers by conversation in labored monosyllables and aggressive vulgarities which disguised their minds.

Time is but the stream I go fishing in. I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. It’s thin current slides away, but eternity remains.

Though wisdom cannot be gotten for gold, still less can be gotten without it.

We must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.

From his cradle to his grave a man never does a single thing which has any FIRST AND FOREMOST object but one – to secure peace of mind, spiritual comfort, for HIMSELF.