Ralph Waldo Emerson

The people are to be taken in small doses.

One lesson we learn early, that in spite of seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are disappointed and angry if we find that we are premature, and that their watches are slower than ours. In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.

The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him.

Knowledge comes by eyes always open and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power.

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

That which builds is better than that which is built.

The human soul, by once suffering as much as it is capable of, purchases a strange and terrible immunity to all the rest of life’s sorrows.

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

People have discovered that they can fool the devil; but they can’t fool the neighbors.

No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself.

I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?

The fortune which nobody sees makes a person happy and unenvied.

One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.

The depth and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves. People reveal themselves completely only when they are thrown out of the customary conditions of their life, for only then do they have to fall back on their reserves.

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.

Imagination is not a talent of some people but is the health of everyone.

There are charms made only for distant admiration.

There is a great deal of human nature in people.

It is a fine thing to be honest, but it is also very important to be right.

Slavery is an institution for converting men into monkeys.