Ralph Waldo Emerson

You can take better care of your secret than another can.

A nation never falls but by suicide.

The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.

I have been writing & speaking what were once called novelties, for twenty five or thirty years, & have not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers but because it did not go …

The book written against fame and learning has the author's name on the title-page.

All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle.

The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution.

I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a 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 …

The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.

Blessed are those who have no talent!

Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.

I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had …

It is easy to live for others; everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.

Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock.

If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as "spiritual life," "God," "soul," "cross," etc., and if they could not find new ones next …

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.

People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.

People say law but they mean wealth.

A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

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

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

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.