Ralph Waldo Emerson

In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place.

How many attractions for us have our passing fellows in the streets, both male and female, which our ethics forbid us to express, which yet infuse so much pleasure into life. A lovely child, a handsome youth, a beautiful girl, a heroic man, a maternal woman, a venerable old man, charm us, though strangers, and we cannot say so, or look at them but for a moment.

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.

To fill the hour – that is happiness.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.

I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.

Certainly virtue is like precious odors, most fragrant when they are incensed, or crushed: for prosperity does best discover vice, but adversity does best discover virtue.

We must not inquire too curiously into motives… They are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.

There is still vitality under the winter snow, even though to the casual eye it seems to be dead.

Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option.

But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.

A man’s wife has more power over him than the state has.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

My liver swells with bile difficult to repress.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.

The only wealth is life.

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.