Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.

Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.

It is a profitable Wisdom to know when we have done enough: Much time and Pains are spared, in not flattering our selves against Probabilities.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him.

What is peculiar in the life of a man consists not in his obedience, but his opposition, to his instincts. In one direction or another he strives to live a supernatural life.

There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.

The less government we have the better.

Liberty without obedience is confusion, and obedience without liberty is slavery.

It’s not whether you get knocked down, its whether you get back up.

Society therefore is an ancient as the world.

Why do you hasten to remove anything which hurts your eye, while if something affects your soul you postpone the cure until next year?

The only gift is a portion of thyself.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

Understanding is a two-way street.

Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.

Above all, we must avoid the pitfalls of tribalism. If we are divided among ourselves on tribal lines, we open our doors to foreign intervention and its potentially harmful consequences.