Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature… She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.

The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.

We need much less than we think we need.

Each thought is a nail that is driven In structures that cannot decay; And the mansion at last will be given To us as we build it each day.

What you do today can improve all your tomorrows.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

I refused to attend his funeral. But I wrote a very nice letter explaining that I approved of it.

The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist.

Duties are not performed for duty’s sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty -the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

Suffering is but another name for the teaching of experience, which is the parent of instruction and the schoolmaster of life.

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.