Ralph Waldo Emerson

That man is idle who can do something better.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.

We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade?

An empire is an immense egotism.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

Character is just another word for having a perfectly disciplined and educated will.

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him great.

Resting at your shore fills me with a peace, as if I’ve always been here. My cells resonating with the element of you, boundaries diffuse as one.

Business is the salt of life.

The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Sometimes if I see negative things it really doesn’t faze me, because you’ve got to be tough and you’ve got to be you.

The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.

Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality.

That’s what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he’s wise.

Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.

In the stillness of the mind I saw myself as I am – unbound.

Life is not an exact science, it is an art.

I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?