Ralph Waldo Emerson

The book written against fame and learning has the author's name on the title-page.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

Many might go to Heaven with half the labor they go to hell.

We cannot let our angels go; we do not see that they only go out that archangels may come in.

It is always so pleasant to be generous, though very vexatious to pay debts.

Our best history is still poetry.

A man should carry nature in his head.

Science surpasses the old miracles of mythology.

Science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or, the state of science is an index of our self-knowledge.

The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zoology, (those first steps which the farmer, the hunter, and the sailor take,) teach that nature's dice are always loaded; that in her heaps and rubbish are concealed sure and useful results.

There can be no excess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty.

Love is our highest word and the synonym of God.

Our desires presage the capacities within us; they are harbingers of what we shall be able to accomplish. What we can do and want to do is projected in our imagination, quite outside ourselves, and into the future. We are attracted to what is already ours in secret. Thus passionate anticipation transforms what is indeed possible into dreamt-for reality.

The eye of prudence may never shut.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. If two or three persons should come with a high spiritual aim and with great powers, the world would fall into their hands like a ripe peach.

We put our love where we have put our labor.

No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken.

The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near.

All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal.

Everything in nature goes by law, and not by luck.

The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it.