Ralph Waldo Emerson

For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?

Don’t be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don’t bewail and moan. Omit the negative propositions. Challenge us with incessant affirmatives. Don’t waste yourself in rejection, or bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.

The true poem is the poet’s mind.

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.

Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters.

For Africa to me… is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

If you want to get what you want give up being right.

Originality is a device that untalented people use to impress other untalented people to protect themselves from talented people…

The secret of culture is to learn, that a few great points steadily reappear.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man’s breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea, to discover a great thought – an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plough had gone over before. To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find a way to make the lightning carry your messages. To be the first – that is the idea.

Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.

This ain’t fun. But you watch me, I’ll get it done.

When desire, having rejected reason and overpowered judgment which leads to right, is set in the direction of the pleasure which beauty can inspire, and when again under the influence of its kindred desires it is moved with violent motion towards the beauty of corporeal forms, it acquires a surname from this very violent motion, and is called love.

Thinking will not overcome fear but action will.

Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.

The master minds of all nations, in all ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from the mass of the nation, and from the mass of the nation only – not from its privileged classes.

Look to make your course regular, that men may know beforehand what they may expect.

The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

The wretched have no compassion, they can do good only from strong principles of duty.