Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

Every great achievement is the victory of a flaming heart.

Dear to us are those who love us… but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.

Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect.

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

I had rather believe all the Fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a Mind.

Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have an obligation to be one. You cannot make any useful contribution in life unless you do this.

Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.

Nothing destroys authority more than the unequal and untimely interchange of power stretched too far and relaxed too much.

Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives. You are always at the crisis: I am always in the convalescent stage.

Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gongthese are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.

Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

Every time I think I have reached the peak, I look up and see I still have a ways to go. But I look back and see just how far I have come.

Does he council you better who bids you, Money, by right means, if you can: but by any means, make money?

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.

I know that we will be the sufferers if we let great wrongs occur without exerting ourselves to correct them.

Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.

Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve.

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.