Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

Necessity does everything well.

Who can guess how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes?

Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.

Do what you know and perception is converted into character.

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

Perfection is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time.

The place of justice is a hallowed place.

Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.

Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.

The greatest man in history was the poorest.

Do what we can, summer will have its flies.

What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what grandeur of spirit we can. Let us be silent, — so we may hear the whisper of the gods. Let us not interfere. Who set you to cast about what you should say to the select souls, or how to say any thing to such? No matter how ingenious, no matter how graceful and bland. There are innumerable degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to be frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Wait until the necessary and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves of your lips. The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.

If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.

As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.

We do not count a man’s years until he has nothing else to count.

The seven deadly sins… food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man’s neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted.

The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

The longer we live the more we think and the higher the value we put on friendship and tenderness towards parents and friends.