Ralph Waldo Emerson

A few strong instincts and a few plain rules suffice us.

In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoon how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.

I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.

No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself.

But you must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know, that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favor. She imagines herself not only certain of accomplishing every adventure, but of obtaining those rewards which the accomplishment may deserve. She is not easily persuaded to believe that the force of merit can be resisted by obstinacy and avarice, or its luster darkened by envy and malignity.

Tomorrow is an old deceiver, and his cheat never grows stale.

Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it – and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again – and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.

Wake up, lift your head, open your eyes, and dream. Gaze softly into your heart’s whispers. Notice the pull of your belly and that which makes you come alive. Let your soul speak, beckoning you to embark on that one voyage you can no longer let lie.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.

It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reason.

Treating your adversary with respect is striking soft in battle.

I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.

Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others.

To be in time is to be asleep: to be awake is to be in eternity.

That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore, that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks! Where is the country’s champion, the Moore of Moore Hall, to meet him at the Deep Cut and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest?

When the eye is not set on one leaf and you face the tree with nothing in mind, any number of leaves are visible to the eye.