Quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson

God offers to every mind a choice between repose and truth. take which you please--you can never have both. [Essay on Intellect]

As we are, so we do; and as we do, so is it done to us; we are the builders of our fortunes.

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?

Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.

Practice radical humility. He (or she)who masters the art of humility cannot be humiliated...

Never read a book that is not a year old.

Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood. -Is it so bad, then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood...

Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.

Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us.

My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

Let the reader find that he cannot afford to omit any line of your writing because you have omitted every word that he can spare.