Ralph Waldo Emerson

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.

Half a man’s wisdom goes with his courage.

My chief want in life is someone who shall make me do what I can.

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt.

Avarice is generally the last passion of those lives of which the first part has been squandered in pleasure, and the second devoted to ambition. He that sinks under the fatigue of getting wealth, lulls his age with the milder business of saving it.

I see the whole concept of Generation X implies that everyone has lost hope.

You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the Government. And, with due respect for these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the Capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.

In a dark place we find ourselves, and a little more knowledge lights our way.

It’s hard to have it all. And if you’re compromising through one phase of your journey, you’re not giving it all up, you’re compromising for that phase

Where charity keeps pace with grain, industry is blessed, but to slave to get, and keep it sordidly, is a sin against Providence, a vice in government and an injury to their neighbours.

To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.

The Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa….Leonardo had eye trouble….Art couldn’t explain it….But now we’re safe, since science can explain it. Maybe Milton wrote Paradise Lost because he was blind? And Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony because he was deaf…

Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.

How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!

We acquire the strength we have overcome.

One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.

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