Ralph Waldo Emerson

As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade?

Who shall set a limit to the influence of a human being?

As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.

No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.

The public do not know enough to be experts, but know enough to decide between them.

The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.

A good memory and a tongue tied in the middle is a combination which gives immortality to conversation.

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.

The newspaper that obstructs the law on a trivial pretext, for money’s sake, is a dangerous enemy to the public weal.That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.

The man who forgives is far stronger than the man who fights.

He that does good for good’s sake seeks neither paradise nor reward, but he is sure of both in the end.

Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change –only to give stability to one beautiful moment.

It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, Know thyself, and too often leads to a self-estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.

For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.