Ralph Waldo Emerson

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

When I was praised I lost my time, for instantly I turned around to look at the work I had thought slightly of, and that day I made nothing new.

If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Every mind has a choice between truth and repose. Take which you please you can never have both.

I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.

Only poetry inspires poetry.

Plenty of times I wanted to haul off when somebody insulted me for the color of my skin, but I had to hold to myself. I knew I was kind of an experiment. The whole thing was bigger than me.

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

Oh man! There is no planet sun or star could hold you, if you but knew what you are.

Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. He has facts ready to his hand; so there is no exercise of invention. Imagination is not required in any degree; only about as much as is used in the lowest kinds of poetry. Some penetration, accuracy, and coloring, will fit a man for the task, if he can give the application which is necessary.

Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.

Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.

The remedy is worse than the disease.

When the water of a place is bad it is safest to drink none that has not been filtered through either the berry of a grape, or else a tub of malt. These are the most reliable filters yet invented.

Your playing small does not serve the world. Who are you not to be great?

The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.