Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

The first wealth is health.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.

If a man’s eye is on the Eternal, his intellect will grow.

A myriad of men are born; they labor and sweat and struggle; …they squabble and scold and fight; they scramble for little mean advantages over each other; age creeps upon them; infirmities follow; …those they love are taken from them, and the joy of life is turned to aching grief. It comes at last-the only unpoisoned gift earth ever had for them-and they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence, …a world which will lament them a day and forget them forever.

A true friend is somebody who can make us do what we can.

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

We are just statistics, born to consume resources.

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.

God enters by a private door into every individual.

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some area of native land where it may get the love of tender kinship from the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead.

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.

The wretched have no compassion, they can do good only from strong principles of duty.

The art of government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third.

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!

All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?