Ralph Waldo Emerson

When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present.

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

Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.

I know of no such unquestionable badge and ensign of a sovereign mind as that of tenacity of purpose.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly.

We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.

For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.

The depth and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves. People reveal themselves completely only when they are thrown out of the customary conditions of their life, for only then do they have to fall back on their reserves.

Above all, we must avoid the pitfalls of tribalism. If we are divided among ourselves on tribal lines, we open our doors to foreign intervention and its potentially harmful consequences.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man’s title to fame.

I pay the schoolmaster, but it is the school boys who educate my son.

Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge.

Breed is stronger than pasture.

He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.

Be careful the friends you choose for you will become like them.

Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.

There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.