Ralph Waldo Emerson

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

A strenuous soul hates cheap success.

One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.

I cannot forgive a scholar his homeless despondency.

I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.

The public is a ferocious beast; one must either chain it or flee from it.

It is your character, and your character alone, that will make your life happy or unhappy.

It is a profitable Wisdom to know when we have done enough: Much time and Pains are spared, in not flattering our selves against Probabilities.

Our faith comes in moments… yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.

Conversation enriches the understanding; but solitude is the school of genius.

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

Knowledge and human power are synonymous.

Most of the shadows of life are caused by standing in our own sunshine.

The majority have no other reason for their opinions than that they are the fashion.

I don’t think it’s meant for man to know everything at once.