Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man’s library is a sort of harem.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.

Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.

If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.

A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

The god of victory is said to be one-handed, but peace gives victory on both sides.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good.

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

I am a child of the House of Commons. I was brought up in my fathers house to believe in democracy. Trust the peoplethat was his message.

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

The holy passion of friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

Work and thou canst escape the reward; whether the work be fine or course, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought.

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

When you cannot get a compliment in any other way pay yourself one.

Nature has always had more force than education.

Whatever limits us we call fate.

The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

I am the flame, electric blue, lightening, razor-like, renewing my spirit. Heart beating in time to the earth’s rhythm and expanse of black ink sky, overreaching eternal. My fingertips spark with seeds of creation, fireworks coloring canvas, beckoned by this light that lifts me.

Do something every day that you don’t want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.