Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Give a boy address and accomplishments and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes.

As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.

Revolutions go not backward.

If a man can... make a better mousetrap, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

I have lost my mental faculties but am perfectly well.

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.

Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

A great man is always willing to be little.

Be silly. Be honest. Be kind.

Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.

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

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.

People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.

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

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.

Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.