Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fear always springs from ignorance.

Them meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.

The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its actions are insane like its whole constitution. It persecutes a principle; it would whip a right; it would tar and feather justice, by inflicting fire and outrage upon the houses and persons of those who have these. It resembles the prank of boys, who run with fire-engines to put out the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

Dear to us are those who love us… but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.

True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism.

Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.

I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.

Every man believes that he has greater possibilities.

So many fail because they don’t get started – they don’t go. They don’t overcome inertia. They don’t begin.

Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.

As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course.

If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.

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

We should come home from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day with new experience and character.

It’s hard to have it all. And if you’re compromising through one phase of your journey, you’re not giving it all up, you’re compromising for that phase

I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

Images also help me find and realise ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.