Ralph Waldo Emerson

It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune, and when you have it, it requires ten times as much skill to keep it.

The true poem is the poet’s mind.

Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.

It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

I trust no one, not even myself.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you’ve taught him everything else first?

It’s all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

We like a man to come right out and say what he thinks, if we agree with him.

If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.

Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.

I really do not see much use in exalting the humble and meek; they do not remain humble and meek long when they are exalted.

I don’t do quagmires.

People ignore the thing they have the most power over. I know so many people who will go to a protest and do something big on an issue. But they won’t deal with that issue in their home.

If I shall sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I’m sure that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for.

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn’t got any.

Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.

Speech of yourself ought to be seldom and well chosen.

Let your character be kept up the very end, just as it began, and so be consistent.