Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.

For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.

What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so much we are.

We estimate the wisdom of nations by seeing what they did with their surplus capital.

Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.

Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.

The virtue in most request is conformity.

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile – hoping it will eat him last.

Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.

Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.