Ralph Waldo Emerson

The evils of popular government appear greater than they are; there is compensation for them in spirit and energy it awakens.

Every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor.

We ask for long life, but 'tis deep life, or noble moments that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical.

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.

Is not prayer a study of truth, a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

The love that you withhold is the pain that you carry.

No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing.

And what greater calamity can fall upon a nation than the loss of worship.

Those who listened to Lord Chatham felt that there was something finer in the man, than anything which he said.

Half a man's wisdom goes with his courage.

The finest and noblest ground on which people can live is truth; the real with the real; a ground on which nothing is assumed.

...most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.

I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?

One man pins me to the wall, while with another I walk among the stars

Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.

Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatize or accept another's dogmatism.

Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as two sides of an algebraic equation.

Wherever there is power there is age.

Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.

The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.

Don't trust children with edge tools. Don't trust man, great God, with more power than he has until he has learned to use that little better. What a hell we should make of the world if we could do what we would!