Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

We live by our imagination, our admirations, and our sentiments.

Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.

We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.

Beware what you set your heart upon. For it shall surely be yours.

Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue. Every natural action is graceful; every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine.

We must have infinite faith in each other. If we have not, we must never let it leak out that we have not.

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

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

I know of no such unquestionable badge and ensign of a sovereign mind as that of tenacity of purpose.

I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.

Never let formal education get in the way of your learning.

We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead – and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.

If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.

He that has given today may, if he so please, take away tomorrow.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est (Knowledge Itself Is Power)

A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

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

Accept your genius and say what you think.