Ralph Waldo Emerson

Necessity does everything well.

Preaching is the expression of moral sentiments applied to the duties of life.

The true artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing –to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

That which builds is better than that which is built.

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.

See, I think you live on earth a certain number of times until you finish what it is that you were meant to do here. And then you go on. I don’t think I’ll be back here. I think I’m done.

The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.

Wherever there is power there is age.

Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air. It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog’s life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial “we.”

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

Duties are not performed for duty’s sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty -the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.

Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

If women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race.

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.

The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library.

You are alive, so be fully alive.