Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.

All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.

Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.

The education of the will is the object of our existence.

Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.

It’s not whether you get knocked down, its whether you get back up.

PATIENCE YOU MUST HAVE my young padawan.

When the eye is not set on one leaf and you face the tree with nothing in mind, any number of leaves are visible to the eye.

We rarely find anyone who can say he has lived a happy life, and who, content with his life, can retire from the world like a satisfied guest.

Many things difficult in design prove easy in performance.

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.

It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.

Writers are the engineers of human souls.

It was his peculiar happiness that he scarcely ever found a stranger whom he did not leave a friend; but it must likewise be added, that he had not often a friend long without obliging him to become a stranger.

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.