Ralph Waldo Emerson

The State must follow, and not lead, the character and progress of the citizen.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

If a man owns land, the land owns him.

Whenever, therefore, people are deceived and form opinions wide of the truth, it is clear that the error has slid into their minds through the medium of certain resemblances to that truth.

Your playing small does not serve the world. Who are you not to be great?

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion.

Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.

Your most precious, valued possessions and your greatest powers are invisible and intangible. No one can take them. You, and you alone, can give them. You will receive abundance for your giving.

There is this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means; draw it all out, and hold him to it.

He that will enjoy the brightness of sunshine, must quit the coolness of the shade.

It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.

In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.

Silence is the virtue of fools.

We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible.

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

Courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.