Ralph Waldo Emerson

Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.

Nothing astonishes people so much as common sense and plain dealing.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

Be careful the friends you choose for you will become like them.

Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.

Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself.

I’ll tell you why yes, because why people lie is, because when people stop lying you know they’ve stopped caring.

Do not tell me of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.

All colors will agree in the dark.

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Real love begins when nothing is expected in return.

It is all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

In this war, a danger there is, of losing who we are.

Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

O imitators, you slavish herd!