Ralph Waldo Emerson

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism, is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion, and making way for truth.

The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.

No man has ever had a point of pride that was not injurious to him.

Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.

If a man knows the law, find out, though he live in a pine shanty, and resort to him. And if a man can pipe or sing, so as to wrap the imprisoned soul in an elysium; or can paint a landscape, and convey into souls and ochres all the enchantments of Spring or Autumn; or can liberate and intoxicate all people who hear him with delicious songs and verses; it is certain that the secret cannot be kept; the first witness tells it to a second, and men go by fives and tens and fifties to his doors.

Pines a thousand years old. Every year they must go farther for them: they recede, like beavers and Indians, before the white man.

No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

Every friend whom not thy fantastic will but the great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And this because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly in endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.

The sensual man conforms thoughts to things;_x000D_ the poet conforms things to his thoughts.

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity.

The merit claimed for the Anglican Church is that,_x000D_ if you let it alone,_x000D_ it will let you alone.

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.

The heroic cannot be the common,_x000D_ nor the common the heroic.

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.

If a man owns land,_x000D_ the land owns him.

The true philosopher and the true poet are one,_x000D_ and a beauty, which is truth,_x000D_ and a truth, which is beauty,_x000D_ is the aim of both.

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the way of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired.

Every man alone is sincere._x000D_ At the entrance of a second person,_x000D_ hypocrisy begins._x000D_ We parry and fend the approach_x000D_ of our fellow-man by compliments,_x000D_ by gossip, by amusements, by affairs._x000D_ We cover up our thought from him_x000D_ under a hundred folds.

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses_x000D_ are still truly adjusted to each other.