Ralph Waldo Emerson

Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Talent for talent’s sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.

Life consists in what a person is thinking of all day.

Dear to us are those who love us… but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.

Culture is one thing and varnish is another.

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.

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy.

What is the most rigorous law of our being? Growth. No smallest atom of our moral, mental, or physical structure can stand still a year. It grows – it must grow; nothing can prevent it.

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.

There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles… but there is one order of beauty which seems made to turn the heads not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief -a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you.

He is the best sailor who can steer within the fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.

Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old.

There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful.

Fearful of missing anything, he read on, filled with this anticipation which was half terror, of coming upon something which would touch him, not simply touch him but lift him and carry him away.

Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

I do not hold that we should rearm in order to fight. I hold that we should rearm in order to parley.

The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right.

Your mind makes a cruel master, but a generous servant.

We are often deterred from crime by the disgrace of others.