"I have been writing & speaking what were once called novelties, for twenty five or thirty years, & have not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves. I delight in driving them from me. What could I do, if they came to me? — they would interrupt and encumber me. This is my boast that I have no school & no follower. I should account it a measure of the impurity of insight, if it did not create independence."

"The book written against fame and learning has the author's name on the title-page."

"All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle."

"The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution."

"I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods."

"The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan."

"Blessed are those who have no talent!"

"Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know."

"I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us."

"It is easy to live for others; everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves."

"Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock."

"If I made laws for Shakers or a school, I should gazette every Saturday all the words they were wont to use in reporting religious experience, as "spiritual life," "God," "soul," "cross," etc., and if they could not find new ones next week, they might remain silent."

"The sky is the daily bread of the eyes."

"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 him or can taken from him but always there is a compensation.. There is a correspondence between the human soul and everything that exists in the world; more properly, everything that is known to man. Instead of studying things without the principles of them, all may be penetrated unto with him. Every act puts the agent in a new position. 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."

"Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better."

"He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses."

"You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both."

"People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad."

"People say law but they mean wealth."

"A good indignation brings out all one's powers."

"How we hate this solemn Ego that accompanies the learned, like a double, wherever he goes."

"The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence."

"He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is."

"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."

"Everything intercepts us from ourselves."

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

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

"Emerson: German philosophy that in crossing the great water took some on underway."

"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."

"That which struck me most, as distinguishing him from most other human beings, is nobility. He is a born nobleman."

"So gentle that he seemed only reading to one person, and yet his voice was so distinct that it filled the room in its lowest tones."

"No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing."