Ralph Waldo Emerson

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

We rail at trade, but the historian of the world will see that it was the principle of liberty; that it settled America, and destroyed feudalism, and made peace and keeps peace; that it will abolish slavery.

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.

Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.

Life is short but there is always time for courtesy.

If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.

Art is not to be found by touring to Egypt, China, or Peru; if you cannot find it at your own door, you will never find it.

A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in your hand until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors. There is no adaptation or universal applicability in men, but each has his special Talent, and the mastery of Successful men consists in adroitly keeping themselves where and when that turn shall be oftenest to be practiced.

The betrothed and accepted lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden by her acceptance. She was heaven while he pursued her, but she cannot be heaven if she stoops to one such as he!

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Though we travel the world over to find beauty, we must carry it with us or we find it not . . . The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is a great difference in beholders.

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.

There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.

We must be our own before we can be another's.

The dice of God are always loaded.

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

There is no better way to exercise the imagination than the study of the law.

The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.