Ralph Waldo Emerson

The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so; but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger, and mosquitoes and silly people.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for competitors.

Slavery is an institution for converting men into monkeys.

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will or against his will he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a threadball thrown at a mark, but the other end remains on the thrower.

Sincerity is the highest complement you can pay.

Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

I am the flame, electric blue, lightening, razor-like, renewing my spirit. Heart beating in time to the earth’s rhythm and expanse of black ink sky, overreaching eternal. My fingertips spark with seeds of creation, fireworks coloring canvas, beckoned by this light that lifts me.

The only sin that we never forgive in each other is a difference in opinion.

The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

It is, indeed, at home that every man must be known by those who would make a just estimate either of his virtue or felicity; for smiles and embroidery are alike occasional, and the mind is often dressed for show in painted honor, and fictitious benevolence.

In all debates let truth be thy aim; not victory or an unjust interest; and endeavor to gain rather than to expose thy antagonist.

Responsibility is the price of greatness.

Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover.

You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.

Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he does not.

Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis.

It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, Know thyself, and too often leads to a self-estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

If they had not landed there would be some reason for celebrating the fact.