Ralph Waldo Emerson

The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man’s title to fame.

There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.

The reason why men do not obey us is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm and constant.

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.

Money and time are the heaviest burdens of life, and the unhappiest of all mortals are those who have more of either than they know how to use.

The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.

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.

Culture is one thing and varnish is another.

There is only one good – knowledge; and only one evil – ignorance.

We are not victims of aging, sickness and death. These are part of scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of change. This seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being.

The resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering.

There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.

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

The dice of God are always loaded.

There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.

Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.