Ralph Waldo Emerson

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe; the key to all ages is – Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men, at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, and fear.

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

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

All the great ages have been ages of belief.

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.

All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.

Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.

We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us.

An honest man is always a child.

A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

If you do not take control over your time and your life, other people will gobble it up. If you don’t prioritize yourself, you constantly start falling lower and lower on your list.

We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession.

There is something in the human spirit that will survive and prevail, there is a tiny and brilliant light burning in the heart of man that will not go out no matter how dark the world becomes.

I’m proof against that word failure. I’ve seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.

The measure of a great leader, is their success in bringing everyone around to their opinion twenty years later.

Friendship is the marriage of the soul, and this marriage is liable to divorce.