Quotations by
Massachusetts Writers

Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-82)
Essayist, Poet, Philosopher
Birthplace: Boston

The thirst for adventure is the vent which Destiny offers; a war, a crusade, a gold mine, a new country, speak to the imagination and offer swing and play to the confined powers.

The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed; there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennuis, vanish,--all duties even.

We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.

There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.

Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone.

The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.

The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.

The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed.

If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.

Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man has a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.

There is properly no history, only biography.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza;--read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.

Gross and obscure natures, however decorated, seem impure shambles; but character gives splendor to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and gray hairs.

A right rule for a club would be, Admit no man whose presence excludes any one topic. It requires people who are not surprised and shocked, who do and let do, and let be, who sink trifles, and know solid values, and who take a great deal for granted.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. . . . The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

One lesson we learn early, that in spite of seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are disappointed and angry if we find that we are premature, and that their watches are slower than ours. In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.

Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused, when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.

All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place.

Courage charms us, because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind.

We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.

It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him.

Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.

Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; for causes which are unpenetrated.

If a man knew anything, he would sit in a corner and be modest; but he is such an ignorant peacock, that he goes bustling up and down, and hits on extraordinary discoveries.

There are three wants which never can be satisfied: that of the rich, who wants something more; that of the sick, who wants something different; and that of the traveler, who says, "Anywhere but here."

Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

An empire is an immense egotism.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

'Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration.

The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society.

A man's personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.

He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.

We estimate the wisdom of nations by seeing what they did with their surplus capital.

Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.

It is always so pleasant to be generous, though very vexatious to pay debts.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.

The only gift is a portion of thyself.

The dice of God are always loaded.

'Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.

Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed.

The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

One definition of man is "an intelligence served by organs."

If a man owns land, the land owns him.

Language is the archives of history.

The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting.

The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.

A man's library is a sort of harem.

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

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.

All mankind love a lover.

Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority?

Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.

We do what we must, and call it by the best names.

New York is a sucked orange.

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

Twenty thousand thieves landed at Hastings. These founders of the House of Lords were greedy and ferocious dragoons, sons of greedy and ferocious pirates. They were all alike, they took everything they could carry, they burned, harried, violated, tortured, and killed until everything English was brought to the verge of ruin. Such, however, is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent and dignified men now existing boast their descent from these filthy thieves, who showed a far juster conviction of their own merits, by assuming for their types the swine, goat, jackal, leopard, wolf, and snake, which they severally resembled.

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.

Only poetry inspires poetry.

A sect or a party is an elegant incognito, devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

Give me insight into today and you may have the antique and future worlds.

No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic also.

Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

Never read any book that is not a year old.

Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.

Dear to us are those who love us . . . but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.

Trust men, and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

That which we call sin in others, is experiment for us.

Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank. . . . Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.

Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

Our spontaneous action is always the best. You cannot, with your best deliberation and heed, come so close to any question as your spontaneous glance shall bring you.

The State must follow, and not lead, the character and progress of the citizen.

If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap, than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.

We boil at different degrees.

To think is to act.

The revelation of Thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

The surest poison is time.

Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.

The highest compact we can make with our fellow is--"Let there be truth between us two forevermore."

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please; you can never have both.

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues.

The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him.

The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.

Wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot.

Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.

The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes a low business-tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact. He calls his employment by its lowest name, and so takes from evil tongues their sharpest weapon. His conversation clings to the weather and the news, yet he allows himself to be surprised into thought, and the unlocking of his learning and philosophy.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.

Benjamin Franklin
(1706-90)
Statesman, Writer
Birthplace: Boston

Those disputing, contradicting, and confuting people are generally unfortunate in their affairs. They get victory, sometimes, but they never get good will, which would be of more use to them.

That which resembles most living one's life over again, seems to be to recall all the circumstances of it; and, to render this remembrance more durable, to record them in writing.

Necessity never made a good bargain.

If you teach a poor young man to shave himself, and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand guineas. This sum may be soon spent, the regret only remaining of having foolishly consumed it; but in the other case, he escapes the frequent vexation of waiting for barbers, and of their sometimes dirty fingers, offensive breaths, and dull razors.

In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

The great secret of succeeding in conversation is to admire little, to hear much; always to distrust our own reason, and sometimes that of our friends; never to pretend to wit, but to make that of others appear as much as possibly we can; to hearken to what is said and to answer to the purpose.

There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered neighbours. This is robbery. The second by commerce, which is generally cheating. The third by agriculture, the only honest way, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favor, as a reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry.

A benevolent man should allow a few faults in himself, to keep his friends in countenance.

Be studious in your profession, and you will be learned. Be industrious and frugal, and you will be rich. Be sober and temperate, and you will be healthy. Be in general virtuous, and you will be happy. At least you will, by such conduct, stand the best chance for such consequences.

Those who govern, having much business on their hands, do not generally like to take the trouble of considering and carrying into execution new projects. The best public measures are therefore seldom adopted from previous wisdom, but forced by the occasion.

I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.

There never was a good war or a bad peace.

I have always thought that one man of tolerable abilities may work great changes, and accomplish great affairs among mankind, if he first forms a good plan, and, cutting off all amusements or other employments that would divert his attention, make the execution of that same plan his sole study and business.

Every accent, every emphasis, every modulation of voice, was so perfectly well turned and well placed, that, without being interested in the subject, one could not help being pleased with the discourse; a pleasure of much the same kind with that received from an excellent piece of music. This is an advantage itinerant preachers have over those who are stationary, as the latter can not well improve their delivery of a sermon by so many rehearsals.

Some punishment seems preparing for a people who are ungratefully abusing the best constitution and the best King any nation was ever blessed with, intent on nothing but luxury, licentiousness, power, places, pensions, and plunder; while the ministry, divided in their counsels, with little regard for each other, worried by perpetual oppositions, in continual apprehension of changes, intent on securing popularity in case they should lose favor, have for some years past had little time or inclination to attend to our small affairs, whose remoteness makes them appear even smaller.

Furnished as all Europe now is with Academies of Science, with nice instruments and the spirit of experiment, the progress of human knowledge will be rapid and discoveries made of which we have at present no conception. I begin to be almost sorry I was born so soon, since I cannot have the happiness of knowing what will be known a hundred years hence.

Like a man traveling in foggy weather, those at some distance before him on the road he sees wrapped up in the fog, as well as those behind him, and also the people in the fields on each side, but near him all appears clear, though in truth he is as much in the fog as any of them.

I am about courting a girl I have had but little acquaintance with. How shall I come to a knowledge of her faults, and whether she has the virtues I imagine she has? Answer. Commend her among her female acquaintances.

We are more thoroughly an enlightened people, with respect to our political interests, than perhaps any other under heaven. Every man among us reads, and is so easy in his circumstances as to have leisure for conversations of improvement and for acquiring information.

Most people dislike vanity in others, whatever share they have of it themselves; but I give it fair quarter, wherever I meet with it, being persuaded that it is often productive of good to the possessor, and to others who are within his sphere of action: and therefore, in many cases, it would not be altogether absurd if a man were to thank God for his vanity among the other comforts of life.

What vast additions to the conveniences and comforts of living might mankind have acquired, if the money spent in wars had been employed in works of public utility; what an extension of agriculture even to the tops of our mountains; what rivers rendered navigable, or joined by canals; what bridges, aqueducts, new roads, and other public works, edifices, and improvements . . . might not have been obtained by spending those millions in doing good, which in the last war have been spent in doing mischief.