Ralph Waldo Emerson

Imagination is not a talent of some people but is the health of everyone.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.

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.

By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.

By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.

We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.

Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.

Wine makes a man better pleased with himself. I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others… This is one of the disadvantages of wine, it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

Strange – is it not? That of the myriads who Before us passed the door of Darkness through, Not one returns to tell us of the road Which to discover we must travel too.

The best reformers the world has ever seen are those who commence on themselves.

There is no one who does not exaggerate!

I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious – except he purposely shut the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force.

There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.

It is reasonable to have perfection in our eye that we may always advance toward it, though we know it can never be reached.