Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Children are all foreigners.

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

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

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.

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

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

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

Everything intercepts us from ourselves.

The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself. He is not to live the future as described to him but to live the real future to the real present. The highest revelation is that God is in every man.

A man contains all that is needful to his government within himself. He is made a law unto himself. All real good or evil that can befal [sic] him must be from himself. He only can do himself any good or any harm. Nothing can be given to …

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

The Religion that is afraid of science dishonours God and commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it legislates, tyrannizes over a village of God's empires but is not the immutable universal law. …

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The clergy are as like as peas.