Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a tendency for things to right themselves.

Genius Borrows nobly.

Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.

The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.

That which we call character is a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means. It is conceived of as a certain undemonstrable force, a familiar or genius, by whose impulses the man is guided, but whose counsels he cannot impart.

There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.

When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else… you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.

I hate the irreverent rabble and keep them far from me.

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my own constitution; the only wrong what is against it.

If it be an evil to judge rashly or untruly any single man, how much a greater sin it is to condemn a whole people.

It’s like something shifted when I spoke to you, I can’t even put words to it. This sense of gentle peace, space, lightness, freedom. The realization that the longing I carried for so long, that pain was not about him all along. It was the yearning to return to that place from which, once upon a time, we all came.

A lawyers dream of heaven; every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.

Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerve give to wisdom.

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.

We have a problem. Congratulations. But it’s a tough problem. Then double congratulations.

For who is pleased with himself.

They are decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

If a better system is thine, impart it; if not, make use of mine.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.