Why is a man with a knife after your blood? Who sent him? I would like to write the fellow a letter of thanks!

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

It has always been my understanding that truth and freedom can only exist in wild places.

Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and out...

In 1881, being on a visit to Boston, my wife and I found ourselves in the Parker House with the Ingersoll’s, and went over to Charleston to hear him lecture. His subject was ‘Some Mistakes...

Enmerson’s interest is in the workshop phase, the birthing stage of art, not the museum moment, the embalming phase. Poetry mimics Creation and is therefore sacred. More precisely, just as God may indeed be a...

You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes.

Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.

Well,’ I said. ‘I could strip off my clothes and reveal to you that under my jeans and sweatshirt I’m actually wearing a tank top and short-shorts, much like Lara Croft from Tomb Raider…only mine...

{McCabe on the influential scientist Luther Burbank}His magnificent work, which added an incalculable sum to the wealth of America and left him a comparatively poor man, is well known. His own simple account of his...

Mr. Emerson watched, almost breathless, as she swirled the wine in her glass expertly, then lifted it so that she could examine it more closely in the candlelight. She brought the glass to her nose,...

The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.

Love what is simple and beautiful. These are the essentials.

Emerson has what I believe is called a selective memory. He can recall minute details of particular excavations but is likely to forget where he left his hat.

Your goodness must have some edge to it — else it is none.

…DAMNATION!’No device of the printer’s art, not even capital letters, can indicate the intensity of that shriek of rage. Emerson is known to his Egyptian workers by the admiring sobriquet of Father of Curses. The...

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.