Ralph Waldo Emerson

I must feel pride in my friend's accomplishments as if they were mine,—and a property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he is praised, as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden.

Beside all the small reasons we assign, there is a great reason for the existence of every extant fact; a reason which lies grand and immovable, often unsuspected behind it in silence.

Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope, just as we need water for our bath.

Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,—at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories.

Men do not believe in the power of education. We do not think we can speak to divine sentiments in man, and we do not try. We renounce all high aims.

Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.

There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you, and you are he; then is a teaching; and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever lose the benefit.

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.

The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded.

Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction.

A mob is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason, and traversing its work. The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.

I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.

You shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house.

The hardiest skeptic who has seen a horse broken, a pointer trained, or has visited a menagerie or the exhibition of the Industrious Fleas, will not deny the validity of education. "A boy," says Plato, "is the most vicious of all beasts;" and in the same spirit the old English poet Gascoigne says, "A boy is better unborn than untaught."

In this our talking America, we are ruined by our good nature and listening on all sides. This compliance takes away the power of being greatly useful.

If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed.

The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.

Every word we speak is million-faced or convertible to an indefinite number of applications. If it were not so we could read no book. Your remark would only fit your case, not mine.

Do not shut up the young people against their will in a pew, and force the children to ask them questions for an hour against their will.

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the otherest.

Graceful women, chosen men Dazzle every mortal: Their sweet and lofty countenance His enchanting food.

We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter, we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at night.

The learned and the studious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some degree disqualifies them to think truly.

Our theism is the purification of the human mind. Man can paint, or make, or think nothing but man. He believes that the great material elements had their origin from his thought.

We owe to genius always the same debt, of lifting the curtain from the common, and showing us that divinities are sitting disguised in the seeming gang of gypsies and peddlars.

A great licentiousness treads on the heels of a reformation.

A drop of water has the properties of the sea, but cannot exhibit a storm. There is beauty of a concert, as well as of a flute; strength of a host, as well as of a hero.

The longer we live the more we must endure the elementary existence of men and women; and every brave heart must treat society as a child, and never allow it to dictate.

Man moves in all modes, by legs of horses, by wings of winds, by steam, by gas of balloon, by electricity, and stands on tiptoe threatening to hunt the eagle in his own element.

There is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society.

No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken. 'Tis a step out of the chalk circle of imbecility into fruitfulness.

The highest praise we can attribute to any writer, painter, sculptor, builder, is, that he actually possessed the thought or feeling with which he has inspired us.

Liberation of the will from the sheaths and clogs of organization which he has outgrown, is the end and aim of this world.

Society is a masked ball, where everyone hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.

Marriage (in what is called the spiritual world) is impossible, because of the inequality between every subject and every object.

I do not speak with any fondness but the language of coolest history, when I say that Boston commands attention as the town which was appointed in the destiny of nations to lead the civilization of North America.

Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right.

Let us not be too much acquainted. I would have a man enter his house through a hall filled with heroic and sacred sculptures, that he might not want the hint of tranquillity and self-poise.

If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap, than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole.

Could Shakespeare give a theory of Shakespeare?

Best masters for the young writer and speaker are the fault- finding brothers and sisters at home who will not spare him, but will pick and cavil, and tell the odious truth.

How dare I read Washington's campaigns, when I have not answered the letters of my own correspondents? Is not that a just objection to much of our reading? It is a pusillanimous desertion of our work to gaze after our neighbours. It is peeping.

The rule for hospitality and Irish "help," is, to have the same dinner every day throughout the year. At last, Mrs. O'Shaughnessy learns to cook it to a nicety, the host learns to carve it, and the guests are well served.

Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlor soldiers. We shun the ragged battle of fate, where strength is born.

The world is full of judgment-days, and into every assembly that a man enters, in every action he attempts, he is gauged and stamped.

The boy is a Greek; the youth, romantic; the adult, reflective.

For, the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet.

Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology.

No institution will be better than the institutor.