Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with celestial air, until it eclipses the sun and moon.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves…

Do what we can, summer will have its flies.

Mr. Emerson visited Thoreau at the jail, and the meeting between the two philosophers must have been interesting and somewhat dramatic. The account of the meeting was told me by Miss Maria Thoreau Henry Thoreaus auntHenry, why are you here? Waldo, why are you not here?

There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.

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

First and foremost, it’s going to be treat others with respect. Be polite: Manners go a long way. Try to come from a good place. And aside from that, stay focused and do the right thing.

We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

New arts destroy the old.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

It happened once that a youth and a maiden beheld each other in a public assembly for the first time

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.

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown.

Sexes make no Difference; since in Souls there is none: And they are the Subjects of Friendship.

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.

Let us my friends snatch our opportunity from the passing day.

Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself.

Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.