Ralph Waldo Emerson

The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

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

That which we call character is a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means. It is conceived of as a certain undemonstrable force, a familiar or genius, by whose impulses the man is guided, but whose counsels he cannot impart.

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly-full of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

What do we live for; if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.

How could a man be satisfied with a decision between such alternatives and under such circumstances? No more than he can be satisfied with his hat, which he’s chosen from among such shapes as the resources of the age offer him, wearing it at best with a resignation which is chiefly supported by comparison.

Real practice has no purpose or direction, so it can include everything that comes.

All excess is ill, but drunkenness is of the worst sort. It spoils health, dismounts the mind, and unmans men. It reveals secrets, is quarrelsome, lascivious, impudent, dangerous and bad.

The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.

Security will produce danger.

By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved or undeserved.

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

Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.

A perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

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

The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.

Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.