Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.

The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men.

Can anybody remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?

If a man owns land, the land owns him.

A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

Work is always an antidote to depression.

If I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior.

A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts.

The greatest homage we can pay truth is to use it.

In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author’s own life into them.

Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender.

Do or do not. There is no try.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.

This is no time for ease and comfort. It is the time to dare and endure.

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.