Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue. Every natural action is graceful; every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine.

Slavery is an institution for converting men into monkeys.

There is always a best way of doing everything.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Let us not look east and west for materials of conversation, but rest in presence and unity. A just feeling will fast enough supply fuel for discourse, if speaking be more grateful than silence. When people come to see us, we foolishly prattle, lest we be inhospitable. But things said for conversation are chalk eggs. Don’t say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. A lady of my acquaintance said, I don’t care so much for what they say as I do for what makes them say it.

Nothing external to you has any power over you.

Human ‘beans’ is the only animals that is killing their own kind.

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.

Life is what you make it. Always has been, always will be.

In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it’s more dangerous to lose than to win.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.

The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in.

Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

If a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.

As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course.

Courage charms us, because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind.

If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use the pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time; a tremendous whack.

Breed is stronger than pasture.

The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it.

Laughter is the greatest weapon we have and we, as humans, use it the least.