Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman – repose in energy.

It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune, and when you have it, it requires ten times as much skill to keep it.

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.

The secret of culture is to learn, that a few great points steadily reappear.

Train hard, turn up, run your best and the rest will take care of itself.

Stupidity is something you can only partly save people from.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.

Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

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

Your mind will enchain you. Your heart will set you free.

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some area of native land where it may get the love of tender kinship from the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead.

Knowledge comes by eyes always open and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till the other is ready, and it may be along time before they get off.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.