Ralph Waldo Emerson

As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.

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.

I pay the schoolmaster, but it is the school boys who educate my son.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

We boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is through a transfer of idolatry.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

Why is that others have so much faith in me, while I have so little? Why can’t I have the same belief in me that they have? Why can’t I see in myself, what they do? What is it that makes me, hold myself back? How many more hurdles do I need to overcome? There are so many questions that I have to find the answers to. And I will only find them by focusing and being completely honest with myself.

Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today.

It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, to be healthy with physic, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

An index is a great leveller.

The roses under my window make no reference to former roses or better ones; they are what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not.

No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.

Creativity is a consequence of action, not its motivation. Do what needs to be done and then ask whether it was possible.

Reality is a sliding door.

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.

Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

I am a democrat only on principle, not by instinct – nobody is that. Doubtless some people say they are, but this world is grievously given to lying.