Ralph Waldo Emerson

Knowledge exists to be imparted.

Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual.

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.

Life too near paralyses art.

I didn’t find my friends; the good Lord gave them to me.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

The masses have no habit of self reliance or original action.

Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

You and I are essentially infinite choice-makers. In every moment of our existence, we are in that field of all possibilities where we have access to an infinity of choices.

The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

The man who leaves money to charity in his will is only giving away what no longer belongs to him.

There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for competitors.

If I have said something to hurt a man once, I shall not get the better of this by saying many things to please him.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

It is a time when one’s spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.

We have a lot of anxieties, and one cancels out another very often.