Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man is related to all nature.

When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.

See only that thou work and thou canst not escape the reward.

There is no one who does not exaggerate!

Men are respectable only as they respect.

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.

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

Knowledge is power.

Houses are built to live in, and not to look on: therefore let use be preferred before uniformity.

No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.

If he really thinks there is no distinction between vice and virtue, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.

Part of her mystery is how she is calm in the storm and anxious in the quiet.

We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it.

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

It is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.

He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing –to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

We are not victims of aging, sickness and death. These are part of scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of change. This seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being.

There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.

But men must know, that in this theatre of man’s life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.

If a man owns land, the land owns him.