Ralph Waldo Emerson

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

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.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.

That which builds is better than that which is built.

Revolutions go not backward.

Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life;

Shallow people believe in luck and in circumstances; Strong people believe in cause and effect.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.

All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.

If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.

By indignities men come to dignities.

We may not pay Satan reverence, for that would be indiscreet, but we can at least respect his talents.

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.

As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.

We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead – and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.

The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow.

I strive to be brief, and I become obscure.

I am a sky gazer. The sky, it pulls at me. Its amazing eternal expanse of breathtaking beauty calls me back to my senses, stretches my awareness, soothes my eyes, opens my heart, stills me. I feel a soft soul longing to be up there, in the vastness, amongst the clouds that are alive and billow and skud and glow; metamorphosing from perfection into perfection. A constantly changing canvas brushed by magic.