Ralph Waldo Emerson

Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws.

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

Poverty consist in feeling poor.

Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Do what you know and perception is converted into character.

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.

We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!

Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.

Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old.

I went to the Bach Choir concert and heard Mozart’s Requiem. I did not rise warmly to it. Then I heard an extract from Parsifal which I disliked very much. If Bach wriggles, Wagner writhes…

Revolutions go not backward.

Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated.

When the desire ain’t on me I don’t need help. When it is on me I don’t want any. See? Like the old fellah that never mended his roof. Said on a wet day he couldn’t do it and on a dry day it was as good as anybody’s.

The memory of a day like today reminds me to hold the ones I love that much tighter, that much longer… Take that much more time to be present and to feel the blessing of another day…

If you are in a poker game and after 20 minutes you don’t know who the patsy is, then you’re the patsy.

The mind is refrigerated by interruption; the thoughts are diverted from the principal subject; the reader is weary, he suspects not why; and at last throws away the book, which he has too diligently studied.

Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of the human mind.

The only guide to man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.

It’s the ones that stayed after the Exodus, that I knew were real and could handle the truth; that would stay with me on my journey, for better or worse.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.