Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are books which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

The best efforts of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society.

Necessity does everything well.

There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, What it will do with you?

There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.

The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.

To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.

Things do not change; we change.

The liar’s punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.

The only things one can admire at length are those one admires without knowing why.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

Get a black suit and just freeload, problem it’s too God damned late now even to be any of the things I never wanted to be.

I am reminded of the professor who, in his declining hours, was asked by his devoted pupils for his final counsel. He replied, ‘Verify your quotations.’

The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.

For character too is a process and an unfolding… among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protuberant there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations?