The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure. You must have genius or a prodigious usefulness if you will hide the want of measure.

We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter we stand by the old — reformers in the morning, conservatives at night. Reform is affirmative, conservatism is negative; conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth.

The activity of to-day and the assurance of to-morrow.

Revolutions never go backwards.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.

Self-command is the main elegance.

The effects of opposition are wonderful. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing of a threat, — men to whom a crisis which intimidates and paralyzes the majority — demanding, not the faculties of prudence and thrift, but comprehension, immovableness, the readiness of sacrifice — comes graceful and beloved as a bride!

Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of Nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is million fathoms deep.

Nature is no sentimentalist, — does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman, but swallows your ships like a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons.

Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the One breaks in everywhere.

Shallow men believe in luck.

In skating over thin ice our safety is our speed.

I read your piece on Plato. Holmes, when you strike at a king, you must kill him.

Every man I meet is in some way my superior, and in that, I can learn of him.

Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor time unmake what poets know.

I hung my verse in the wind Time and tide their faults will find.

So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine and so much in retrospect, that the amount of each person’s genius is confined to a very few hours.

The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.

The poor, short lone fact dies at birth. Memory catches it up into her heaven and bathes it in immortal waters.

What strength belongs to every plant and animal in nature. The tree or the brook has no duplicity, no pretentiousness, no show. It is, with all its might and main, what it is, and makes one and the same impression and effect at all times. All the thoughts of a turtle are turtles, and of a rabbit, rabbits. But a man is broken and dissipated by the giddiness of his will; he does not throw himself into his judgments; his genius leads him one way but 't is likely his trade or politics in quite another.

Characters and talents are complemental and suppletory. The world stands by balanced antagonisms. The more the peculiarities are pressed the better the result. The air would rot without lightning; and without the violence of direction that men have, without bigots, without men of the fixed idea, no excitement, no efficiency. The novelist should not make any character act absurdly, but only absurdly as seen by others. For it is so in life. Nonsense will not keep its unreason if you come into the humorist's point of view, but unhappily we find it is fast becoming sense, and we must flee again into the distance if we would laugh.

I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made the theological scheme of redemption absolutely incredible

What is there in 'Paradise Lost' to elevate and astonish like Herschel or Somerville?

It is sublime as night and a breathless ocean. It contains every religious sentiment, all the grand ethics, which visit in turn each noble poetic mind .... It is of no use to put away the book if I trust myself in the woods or in a boat upon the pond. Nature makes a Brahmin of me presently: eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken silence .... This is her creed. Peace, she saith to me, and purity and absolute abandonment - these panaceas expiate all sin and bring you to the beatitude of the Eight Gods.

The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.

The virtues of society are the vices of the saints.

We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.

If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. 6.

For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world.

When Confucius and the Indian Scriptures were made known, no claim to monopoly of ethical wisdom could be thought of... It is only within this century [the 1800 's] that England and America discovered that their nursery tales were old German and Scandinavian stories; and now it appears that they came from India, and are therefore the property of all the nations.

[The Upanishads and the Vedas] haunt me. In them I have found eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken peace.

The Indian teaching, through its clouds of legends, has yet a simple and grand religion, like a queenly countenance seen through a rich veil. It teaches to speak truth, love others, and to dispose trifles. The East is grand - and makes Europe appear the land of trifles .... all is soul and the soul is Vishnu ... cheerful and noble is the genius of this cosmogony. Hari is always gentle and serene - he translates to heaven the hunter who has accidentally shot him in his human form, he pursues his sport with boors and milkmaids at the cow pens; all his games are benevolent and he enters into flesh to relieve the burdens of the world.

A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,— congestion of the brain, apoplexy, and strangulation.

The best lightning-rod for your protection is your own spine.

Even when provocation was great, his satire was so gentle and genial that it warmed even its object.

He liked to taste but not to drink—least of all to become intoxicated.

[N]o one has had so steady and constant and above all so natural, a vision of what we require and what we are capable of in the way of aspiration and independence.

[A] great original thinker, who had his earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village. ... People that had lighted on a new thought or a thought that they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary.

He is a perfect swimmer on the ocean of modern existence. He dreads no tempest, for he is sure that calm will follow it.

He is the most original mind America has hitherto produced.

Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion of Mexico were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists...Emerson supported territorial expansion at any cost but would have preferred it take place without war.

England laughed at American authorship and we sent her Emerson...

"We, as we read," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in an essay on history, "must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly."

It was a maxim with him that power is not so much shown in talent or in successful performance as in tone; the absolute or the victorious tone ... He disliked limitations, and welcomed whatever promised to get rid of them, without always inquiring very closely what was left when they were removed.

What, then, is his secret? Is it not that he out-Yankees us all? that his range includes us all? that he is equally at home with the potato disease and original sin, with pegging shoes and the Over-soul? that, as we try all trades, so has he tried all cultures? and above all, that his mysticism gives us a counterpoise to our super-practicality?

There is no man living to whom, as a writer, so many of us feel and thankfully acknowledge so great an indebtedness for ennobling impulses.

There was a majesty about him beyond all other men I have known, and he habitually dwelt in that ampler and diviner air to which most of us, if ever, only rise in spurts.

American self-confidence, Emerson argued, should be grounded not in a narrow chauvinistic claim about the superiority of the American way but rather in a mature affirmation of America's gifts to the world as well as candid acknowledgment of the "most un-handsome part of our condition." Cheap American patriotism not only reflects an immaturity and insecurity, he warned, but also is an adolescent defense mechanism that reveals a fear to engage the world and learn from others. Narrow nationalism is a handmaiden of imperial rule, he argues-it keeps the populace deferential and complacent. Hence it abhors critics and dissenters like Emerson who unsettle and awaken the people. His shining example of democratic intellectual work is a challenge to us today. This challenge has been taken up through the years by a stream of Emersonian voices-from Walt Whitman to William James, Gertrude Stein. W. E. B. Du Bois, and Muriel Rukeyser.

He began where many poets end, seeking at once the upper air, the region of pure thought and ideality. ... Emerson was the freest and most ideal of them all, and what came to him by inheritance or prophetic forecast he gave like a victor.