Ralph Waldo Emerson

A strenuous soul hates cheap success.

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.

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

The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.

The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it.

Beware the barrenness of a busy life.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.

It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth into a liar – that I call an achievement.

Ice-cream is exquisite – what a pity it isn’t illegal.

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

You don’t get respect if you don’t deserve it

Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence – neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish – it is an imponderably valuable gift.

Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race – the individual’s distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety’s or comfort’s sake, to stand well in his neighbor’s eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions.

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

He took off his hat and shook it (having hurried home as though his own coronation were waiting), and moved now with the slow deliberation of lonely people who have time for every meager requirement of their lives.

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.