Ralph Waldo Emerson

Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign is cheerfulness – an open and noble temper.

Mr. Emerson visited Thoreau at the jail, and the meeting between the two philosophers must have been interesting and somewhat dramatic. The account of the meeting was told me by Miss Maria Thoreau Henry Thoreaus auntHenry, why are you here? Waldo, why are you not here?

Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue. Every natural action is graceful; every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine.

God enters by a private door into every individual.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

The first farmer was the first man. All historic nobility rests on the possession and use of land.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

I will not say do not weep, for not all tears are evil.

People sleep, and when they die they wake.

To succeed in the other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do.

He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?

When any calamity has been suffered, the first thing to be remembered is how much has been escaped.

Acorns were good until bread was found.

Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans –which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.

Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. He has facts ready to his hand; so there is no exercise of invention. Imagination is not required in any degree; only about as much as is used in the lowest kinds of poetry. Some penetration, accuracy, and coloring, will fit a man for the task, if he can give the application which is necessary.

As soon as there is life there is danger.

It’s so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don’t say it.

For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocency, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent: his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil: for without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced.

Heaven is the work of the best and kindest men and women. Hell is the work of prigs, pedants and professional truth-tellers. The world is an attempt to make the best of Heaven and Hell.

If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.

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