Ralph Waldo Emerson

In failing circumstances no one can be relied on to keep their integrity.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men – that is genius.

Act, if you like, but you do it at your peril. Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

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

Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.

The eye is easily frightened.

True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can’t find anybody who can tell me what they want.

A perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

Above anything else, I hate to lose.

I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.

The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness…

What do we call love, hate, charity, revenge, humanity, forgiveness? Different results of the master impulse, the necessity of securing one’s self-approval.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.

The miracles of genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be analyzed.

Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.