Ralph Waldo Emerson

We acquire the strength we have overcome.

Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables.

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

Mr. Emerson visited Thoreau at the jail, and the meeting between the two philosophers must have been interesting and somewhat dramatic. The account of the meeting was told me by Miss Maria Thoreau Henry Thoreaus auntHenry, why are you here? Waldo, why are you not here?

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men – that is genius.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

This merriment of parsons is mighty offensive.

Avoid inquisitive persons, for they are sure to be gossips, their ears are open to hear, but they will not keep what is entrusted to them.

When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.

Sympathetic people often don’t communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths.

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

Nothing is to be preferred before justice.

The first thing a great person does, is make us realize the insignificance of circumstance.

No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.

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

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.

Sense never fails to give them that have it, Words enough to make them understood. It too often happens in some conversations, as in Apothecary Shops, that those Pots that are Empty, or have Things of small Value in them, are as gaudily Dress’d as those that are full of precious Drugs. They that soar too high, often fall hard, making a low and level Dwelling preferable. The tallest Trees are most in the Power of the Winds, and Ambitious Men of the Blasts of Fortune. Buildings have need of a good Foundation, that lie so much exposed to the Weather.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

A good conscience is a continual feast.