Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.

If you cannot be free be as free as you can.

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this.

A friend is a person who goes around saying nice things about you behind your back.

Happy is the house that shelters a friend.

Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners.

I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances.

A friend is Janus-faced: he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend.

Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command.

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.

Treat your friend as a spectacle.

The secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy.

Friendship buys friendship.

It is one of the biggest blessing that you can be stupid with your true friends and behave like you shame to do elsewhere

The wise man, the true friend, the finished character, we seek everywhere, and only find in fragments.

A divine person is the prophecy of the mind; a friend is the hope of the heart.

The only joy in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine.

Persecution readily knits friendship between its victims.

The condition which high friendship demands is the ability to do without it.

To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not?

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

Insist upon yourself. Be original.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.