Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.

Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.

Poverty consist in feeling poor.

Only poetry inspires poetry.

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.

The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.

The late M. Venizelos observed that in all her wars Englandhe should have said Britain, of coursealways wins one battlethe last.

Man – a creature made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.

Only trust theyself, and another shall noet betray thee

She is but half a wife that is not, nor is capable of being, a friend.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

A perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

A friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us. The friend asks no return but that his friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him. They cherish each other’s hopes. They are kind to each other’s dreams.

There is a wisdom in this beyond the rules of physic: a man’s own observation what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of is the best physic to preserve health.

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

The billiard table is better than the doctor.

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.

Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.