Ralph Waldo Emerson

Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.

Live, let live, and help live

No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby-so helpless and so ridiculous.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

Don’t be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don’t bewail and moan. Omit the negative propositions. Challenge us with incessant affirmatives. Don’t waste yourself in rejection, or bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

It is immoral to get drunk because the headache comes after the drinking, but if the headache came first and the drunkenness afterwards, it would be moral to get drunk.

Let him that would move the world, first move himself.

The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.

The true poem is the poet’s mind.

You can free yourself from aging by reinterpreting your body and by grasping the link between belief and biology.

Unconsciously we all have a standard by which we measure other men, and if we examine closely we find that this standard is a very simple one, and is this: we admire them, we envy them, for great qualities we ourselves lack. Hero worship consists in just that. Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do. We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.

It is all right to rat, but you can’t re-rat.

All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.

Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.

I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

God as now generally conceived of is only the last witch.

Every time I think I have reached the peak, I look up and see I still have a ways to go. But I look back and see just how far I have come.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.