Ralph Waldo Emerson

To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

The measure of a great leader, is their success in bringing everyone around to their opinion twenty years later.

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.

The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.

Do what you know and perception is converted into character.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

Knowledge comes by eyes always open and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power.

There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.

Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions, but those who kindly reprove thy faults.

Tomorrow is an old deceiver, and his cheat never grows stale.

We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.

A verse from the Veda says, ‘What you see, you become.’ In other words, just the experience of perceiving the world makes you what you are. This is a quite literal statement.

Each of us has the right and the responsibility to asses the road which lie ahead and those over which we have traveled, and if the feature road looms ominous or unpromising, and the road back uninviting-inviting, then we need to gather our resolve and carrying only the necessary baggage, step off that road into another direction. If the new choice is also unpalatable, without embarrassment, we must be ready to change that one as well.

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.

Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.

Sense never fails to give them that have it, Words enough to make them understood. It too often happens in some conversations, as in Apothecary Shops, that those Pots that are Empty, or have Things of small Value in them, are as gaudily Dress’d as those that are full of precious Drugs. They that soar too high, often fall hard, making a low and level Dwelling preferable. The tallest Trees are most in the Power of the Winds, and Ambitious Men of the Blasts of Fortune. Buildings have need of a good Foundation, that lie so much exposed to the Weather.

Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.

The mind can go in a thousand directions, but on this beautiful path, I walk in peace.

Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s unbelievable.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.