Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence.”

“How we hate this solemn Ego that accompanies the learned, like a double, wherever he goes.”

“He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.”

“I fancy I need more than another to speak (rather than write), with such a formidable tendency to the lapidary style. I build my house of boulders.”

“Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.”

“Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.”

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

“Self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God.”

“The clergy are as like as peas.”

“Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as 'glittering generalities,' have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever.”

“A mollusk is a cheap edition [of man] with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster-bank or among the seaweed.”

“Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.”

“There are two classes of poets — the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.”

“What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have yet to be discovered.”

“We are never without a pilot. When we know not how to steer, and dare not hoist a sail, we can drift. The current knows the way, though we do not. The ship of heaven guides itself, and will not accept a wooden rudder.”

“To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.”

“When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.”

“The cup of life is not so shallow That we have drained the best That all the wine at once we swallow And lees make all the rest.”

“There is a freemasonry among the dull by which they recognize and are sociable with the dull, as surely as a correspondent tact in men of genius.”

“A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.”

“Everything intercepts us from ourselves.”

“No man can have society upon his own terms. If he seeks it, he must serve it too.”

“Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see — not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.”

“We are always getting ready to live, but never living.”

“Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.”

“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”

“I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.”

“Children are all foreigners.”

“Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the state.”

“He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is.”