Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

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

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.

The first farmer was the first man. All historic nobility rests on the possession and use of land.

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.

Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world alters the world.

What is easy is seldom excellent.

The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works and of greatest merit for the public have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men, which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public. He was reputed one of the wise men that made answer to the question, when a man should marryA young man not yet, an elder man not at all.

Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.

Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written. Everyday would make a whole book of 80,000 words – 365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man – the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don’t labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

There is a great deal of human nature in people.

All the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of women.

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.

What drives me to be who I am, to do all that I do, is not what words will be engraved for my epitaph. What drives me to be who I am, to do what I do, is not vanity, is not for adulation in the eyes of others. What drives me is my own desire to be better; to be happy. When I am dead and buried, the words above will not bring me back to life, I choose to live out my epitaph, and not just for it to be a collection of words someone has chosen to define me.

Courage: the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.