Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.

Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are.

The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.

There is nothing capricious in nature and the implanting of a desire indicates that its gratification is in the constitution of the creature that feel it.

Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

Slavery is an institution for converting men into monkeys.

Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.

Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, neverin nothing, great or small, large or pettynever give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.

Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.

What is read twice is usually remembered more than what is once written.

Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.

We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.

Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.

I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lift human life above the level of farce and give it some of the grace of tragedy.

Logic is like the sword – those who appeal to it, shall perish by it.