Ralph Waldo Emerson

That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.

Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods loved him because men hated him.

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

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

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.

Thinking will not overcome fear but action will.

The philosopher is Nature’s pilot. And there you have our difference: to be n hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.

Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.

The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.

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.

Our faith comes in moments… yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.

Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.

Real love begins when nothing is expected in return.

If any man cannot feel the power of God when he looks upon the stars, then I doubt whether he is capable of any feeling at all. [Ut haec ipsa qui non sentiat deorum vim habere is nihil omnino sensurus esse videatur.]

The serpent if it wants to become the dragon must eat itself.

In the word of no master am I bound to believe.

Try not. Do or do not… there is no try.