Ralph Waldo Emerson

We must be our own before we can be another’s.

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.

America is another name for opportunity.

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.

There are only two forces that can carry light to all the corners of the globe… the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here.

Who then is free? The wise man who can command himself.

Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.

A banker is a fellow who lends his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

That which builds is better than that which is built.

The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.

Only one is a wanderer; two together are always going somewhere.

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.

Nakedness is uncomely, as well in mind as body, and it addeth no small reverence to men’s manners and actions if they be not altogether open. Therefore set it down: That a habit of secrecy is both politic and moral.

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.

There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.

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

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough.