Ralph Waldo Emerson

For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.

The soul’s emphasis is always right.

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

I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?

The secret in education lies in respecting the student.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,Here once the embattled farmers stood,And fired the shot heard round the world.

It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?

Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.

You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have truly lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.

The self divides into ten billion distinct illuminating spirits. Distinguish these without falling into names and classifications.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed.

Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.

A lucky person gets up in the morning, puts both feet on the floor, knows what they’re about to do and thinks it still matters.

Esther liked books out where everyone could see them, a sort of graphic index to the intricate labyrinth of her mind arrayed to impress the most casual guest, a system of immediate introduction which she had found to obtain in a number of grimy intellectual households in Greenwich Village.

When it comes to the point, really bad men are just as rare as really good ones.

God is better served in resisting a Temptation to Evil, than in many formal Prayers.

Melancholy, indeed, should be diverted by every means but drinking.

We should come home from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day with new experience and character.

All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.