Ralph Waldo Emerson

Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?

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.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Men are respectable only as they respect.

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

A man’s action is only a picture book of his creed.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

Poverty consist in feeling poor.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman’s life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul’s highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills.

I’ve learned that making a ‘living’ is not the same thing as ‘making a life’.

A wise man makes what he learns his own, the other shows he is but a copy or a collection at most.

Virtue is too often merely local.

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing, he knew nobody had said it before.

We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.

You should always own a black dress because no one ever remembers a black dress.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.

It is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness – calling their denial knowledge.

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.