Ralph Waldo Emerson

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

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.

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

O imitators, you slavish herd!

Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists – talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having.

It may be that we shall, by a process of sublime irony, have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.

Everything that enlarges the sphere of human powers, that shows man he can do what he thought he could not do, is valuable.

A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavor to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures.

Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights…sexual intercourse!…His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.

I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.

There mark what ills the scholar’s life assail, toil, envy, want, and patron.

Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.

As the physically weak man can make himself strong by careful and patient training, so the man of weak thoughts can make them strong by exercising himself in right thinking.

As long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.

We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible.