Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.

Be an opener of doors.

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.

It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.

We do what we must, and call it by the best names.

Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.

It is generally known, that he who expects much will be often disappointed; yet disappointment seldom cures us of expectation, or has any effect other than that of producing a moral sentence or peevish exclamation.

It is not where you start but how high you aim that matters for success.

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.

Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.

Some of your grief you have cured, and lived to survive; but what torments of pain have you endured that haven’t as yet arrived.

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.

He was doing missionary work. But from the outset he had little success in convincing his charges of their responsibility for a sin committed at the beginning of creation, one which, as they understood it, they were ready and capable (indeed, they carried charms to assure it) of duplicating themselves. He did no better convincing them that a man had died on a tree to save them all: an act which one old Indian, if Gwyon had translated correctly, regarded as “rank presumption”.

I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

Surrender is faith that the power of love can accomplish anything… even when you can not foresee the outcome.

You must avoid sloth, that wicked siren.

To think is to practice brain chemistry.