Ralph Waldo Emerson

We aim above the mark to hit the mark.

If you believe in fate, believe in it, at least, for your good.

I do not hesitate to read all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable – any real insight or broad human sentiment.

It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances.

Nothing external to you has any power over you.

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.

When a man laughs at his troubles he loses a great many friends. They never forgive the loss of their prerogative.

This comes of James teaching me to think for myself, and never to hold back out of fear of what other people may think of me. It works beautifully as long as I think the same things as he does.

The billiard table is better than the doctor.

Fortitude is the marshal of thought, the armor of the will, and the fort of reason.

Nothing makes a man so selfish as work.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

We feel at first as if some opportunities of kindness and sympathy were lost, but learn afterward that any pure grief is ample recompense for all. That is, if we are faithful; for a spent grief is but sympathy with the soul that disposes events, and is as natural as the resin of Arabian trees. Only nature has a right to grieve perpetually, for she only is innocent. Soon the ice will melt, and the blackbirds sing along the river which he frequented, as pleasantly as ever. The same everlasting serenity will appear in this face of God, and we will not be sorrowful, if he is not.

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

Them meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

Know that the amount of criticism you receive may correlate somewhat to the amount of publicity you receive.

I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?

Today is the oldest you’ve ever been, and the youngest you’ll ever be again.