Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.

Beware what you set your heart upon. For it shall surely be yours.

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly-full of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.

It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.

The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.

Nothing is more common than mutual dislike, where mutual approbation is particularly expected.

If there be three distinct and separate Persons, then three distinct and separate Substances. . . . And since the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God . . . then unless the Father, Son and Spirit are three distinct Nothings, they must be three distinct Substances, and consequently three distinct Gods.

Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.

Children demand that their heroes should be freckleless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.

For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.

All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.

My life has been one great big joke, a dance that’s walked a song that’s spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.

Some critics will write ‘Maya Angelou is a natural writer’ – which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.

I want to be all used up when I die.

My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologies. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought – with these I deal.

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

In the stillness of the mind I saw myself as I am – unbound.

Avarice is generally the last passion of those lives of which the first part has been squandered in pleasure, and the second devoted to ambition. He that sinks under the fatigue of getting wealth, lulls his age with the milder business of saving it.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

That things are changed, and that nothing really perishes, and that the sum of matter remains exactly the same, is sufficiently certain.