Ralph Waldo Emerson

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Every artist was first an amateur.

The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

Be true to your own act and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant to break the monotony of a decorous age.

Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.

To watch this crystal globe just sent from heaven to associate with me. While these clouds and this somber drizzling weather shut all in, we two draw nearer and know one another. The gathering in of the clouds with the last rush and dying breath of the wind, and then the regular dripping of twigs and leaves the country over, the impression of inward comfort and Sociableness, the drenched stubble and trees that drop beads on you as you pass, their dim outline seen through the rain on all sides drooping in sympathy with yourself. These are my undisputed territory. This is Nature’s English comfort.

Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.

If you protect a man from folly, you will soon have a nation of fools.

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

I am neither of the East nor of the West, no boundaries exist within my breast.

Coercion is evil precisely because it…eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another.

I am not able to instruct you. I can only tell that I have chosen wrong. I have passed my time in study without experience; in the attainment of sciences which can, for the most part, be but remotely useful to mankind. I have purchased knowledge at the expense of all the common comforts of life: I have missed the endearing elegance of female friendship, and the happy commerce of domestic tenderness.

Stay at home in your mind. Don’t recite other people’s opinions. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Some of your grief you have cured, and lived to survive; but what torments of pain have you endured that haven’t as yet arrived.

Keeping your body healthy is an expression of gratitude to the whole cosmos; trees, clouds, everything.

The power which resides in man is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

Seize the day, put no trust in tomorrow. [Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.Lat.]

Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.

Have the fearless attitude of a hero and the loving heart of a child.

Bounty always receives part of its value from the manner in which it is bestowed.