Ralph Waldo Emerson

God screens us evermore from premature ideas.

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.

As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues.

O friend, never strike sail to a fear! Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas.

The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.

In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoon how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.

I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.

Youth is wasted on the young.

Blame is safer than praise.

A mere literary man is a dull man; a man who is solely a man of business is a selfish man; but when literature and commerce are united, they make a respectable man.

Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

How great, my friends, is the virtue of living upon a little!

It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire and many things to fear.

In peace, as a wise man, he should make suitable preparation for war.

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

The next best thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one.

Softness has such a power to it. When you choose to soften into something, it relaxes, opens, tension releases. Stuck energy flows like blood coursing through veins, bringing much needed oxygen. Life force and warmth enters, connection is rekindled. Find the trust you need to allow softness in; it really is healing.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.