Ralph Waldo Emerson

To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

The course of everything goes to teach us faith.

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

The only sin that we never forgive in each other is a difference in opinion.

That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.

Fly fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.

We had the sky up there, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss whether they was made or just happened.

Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

Intellectual work is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward.

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written. Everyday would make a whole book of 80,000 words – 365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man – the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

Life is what you make it. Always has been, always will be.

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.

You bring out the be(a)st in me. Polarized tension, a raw slash of claw, swathed softly in love. A peace of my mind in tumultuous chaotic razor-sharp clarity, impulsive wit to wisdom, mixing addictive shots of cocktail emotions in a full-spectrum experience.

Men being born with a title to perfect freedom and uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature . . . no one can be put out of his estate and subjected to the political view of another, without his consent.

The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness.

As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

I hate the irreverent rabble and keep them far from me.

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.