Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our distrust is very expensive.

The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it....we see literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from within the field.

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.

Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.

Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory.

Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfillments; each of its joys ripens into a new want.

Science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts.

Extremes meet, and there is no better example than the naughtiness of humility.

If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment, I could never stay there five minutes.

Heaven always bears some proportion to earth. The god of the cannibal will be a cannibal, of the crusades a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.

Of course you will insist on modesty in the children, and respect to their teachers, but if the boy stops you in your speech, cries out that you are wrong and sets you right, hug him!

What potent blood hath modest May.

Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character.

In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil.

Discontent is want of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will.

But there is no end to the praise of books, to the value of the library. Who shall estimate their influence on our population where all the millions read and write ? It is the joy of nations that man can communicate all his thoughts, discoveries and virtues to records that may last for centuries.

A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

The true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

Culture is one thing and varnish is another.

When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.

Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.