Ralph Waldo Emerson

There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.

Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.

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.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails – aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter’s reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.

The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

Prudence is an attitude that keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy.

Love has features which pierce all hearts, he wears a bandage which conceals the faults of those beloved. He has wings, he comes quickly and flies away the same.

Right is right even if everyone is against it and wrong is wrong even if everyone is for it.

Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve.

People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.

Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.

By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.

We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!

The power of daring anything their fancy suggest, as always been conceded to the painter and the poet.

I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual.

The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.