Ralph Waldo Emerson

Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.

God screens us evermore from premature ideas.

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.

Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.

We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.

The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.

How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.

I have found men to be more kind than I expected, and less just.

No thought, no reflection, no analysis, no cultivation, no intention; let it settle itself.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

This is your time and it feels normal to you but really there is no normal. There’s only change, and resistance to it and then more change.

He may justly be numbered among the benefactors of mankind, who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may early be impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to occur habitually to the mind.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

We love and lose in China, we weep on England’s moors, and laugh and moan in Guinea, and thrive on Spanish shores. We seek success in Finland, are born and die in Maine. In minor ways we differ, in major we’re the same.

To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.

Self-trust is the essence of heroism.

Perhaps his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in.