Ralph Waldo Emerson

No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself.

Only poetry inspires poetry.

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

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

Sorrow makes us children again.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.

Sense shines with a double luster when it is set in humility. An able yet humble man is a jewel worth a kingdom.

In all pointed sentences, some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness.

One night awaits all, and death’s path must be trodden once and for all.

One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

A lucky person gets up in the morning, puts both feet on the floor, knows what they’re about to do and thinks it still matters.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good.

Your dreams may have shattered, but that doesn’t mean they are over. They can still be turned into a mosaic of success.

The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.

When the righteous man truth away from his righteousness that he hath committed and doeth that which is neither quite lawful nor quite right, he will generally be found to have gained in amiability what he has lost in holiness.

For too long I have silenced my heart, that now, when I give it the opportunity to speak, it no longer remembers its voice. Locked away, it forgot what it’s like to be free; to roam. Imprisoned within loneliness, I fear Stockholm syndrome has developed.

Tomorrow is always another day to make things right.