Ralph Waldo Emerson

Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.

Let us not look east and west for materials of conversation, but rest in presence and unity. A just feeling will fast enough supply fuel for discourse, if speaking be more grateful than silence. When people come to see us, we foolishly prattle, lest we be inhospitable. But things said for conversation are chalk eggs. Don’t say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. A lady of my acquaintance said, I don’t care so much for what they say as I do for what makes them say it.

A good indignation brings out all one’s powers.

There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.

What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so much we are.

Upon retiring, sleep as if you had entered your last sleep. Upon awakening, leave your bed behind you instantly as if you had cast away a pair of old shoes.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.

I have never accepted what many people have kindly said-namely that I inspired the nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless, and as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it.

The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection.

Croesus said to Cambyses; That peace was better than war; because in peace the sons did bury their fathers, but in wars the fathers did bury their sons.

Only a man’s character is the real criterion of worth.

A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles.

If matters go badly now, they will not always be so.

Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favor. She imagines herself not only certain of accomplishing every adventure, but of obtaining those rewards which the accomplishment may deserve. She is not easily persuaded to believe that the force of merit can be resisted by obstinacy and avarice, or its luster darkened by envy and malignity.

If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap, than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

Old men are dangerous: it doesn’t matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

And all the while I thought I was drowning, I was actually the one holding my head under the water.