Ralph Waldo Emerson

No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.

We have more than we use.

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

Dear to us are those who love us… but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.

Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

Culture is one thing and varnish is another.

Self-denial is not a virtue, it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

The painters could be identified by dirty fingernails; the writers by conversation in labored monosyllables and aggressive vulgarities which disguised their minds.

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.

It is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.

Do not discourage your children from hoarding, if they have a taste to it; whoever lays up his penny rather than part with it for a cake, at least is not the slave of gross appetite; and shows besides a preference always to be esteemed, of the future to the present moment.

A picture is a poem without words.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

A day for toil, an hour for sport, but for a friend is life too short.

I don’t think it’s meant for man to know everything at once.

The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.

Riches are for spending.

Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it.

It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God.