"I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul."

"In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking."

"The soul is subject to dollars."

"The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man."

"A man is a god in ruins."

"The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title. To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food."

"We are, like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox."

"Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact."

"Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous."

"Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."

"Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue."

"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."

"For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness."

"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well."

"What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."

"Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen."

"When it is dark enough, you can see the stars."

"Variation: If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he builds his house in the woods the world will make a beaten path to his door."

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

"As soon as there is life there is danger."

"To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."

"Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting—a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing."

"An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory."

"The next thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one"

"There is a kind of latent omniscience not only in every man but in every particle."

"It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence whether a man be behind it or no."

"A vivid thought brings the power to paint it; and in proportion to the depth of its source is the force of its projection."

"These preachers of beauty, which light the world with their admonishing smile."

"Society undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For everything that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet; he has a fine Geneva watch, but cannot tell the hour by the sun."

"Skepticism is slow suicide."

"His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand to embody any capricious thought that is uppermost in her mind. The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together by a subtle spiritual connection."

"Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debaucher of sentiment?"

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

"Natural religion supplies still all the facts which are disguised under the dogma of popular creeds. The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals."

"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."