Ralph Waldo Emerson

If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap, than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,Here once the embattled farmers stood,And fired the shot heard round the world.

There is always a best way of doing everything.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

The eye is easily frightened.

Conversation enriches the understanding; but solitude is the school of genius.

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.

Excess in Apparel is another costly Folly. The very Trimming of the vain World would cloath all the naked one.

Every person is a God in embryo. Its only desire is to be born.

Oh man! There is no planet sun or star could hold you, if you but knew what you are.

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

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.

Liberty is slow fruit. It is never cheap; it is made difficult because freedom is the accomplishment and perfectness of man.

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

Be yourself. Follow your instincts. Success depends, at least in part, on the ability to carry it off.

We don’t want people to have expectations of us, but then we have expectations of everybody else.