Ralph Waldo Emerson

A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.

Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists – talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having.

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

Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.

I cannot forgive a scholar his homeless despondency.

Silence is the virtue of fools.

Some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

Shut your mouth, close your lips, and say something!

Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark: – I wasn’t worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

That after an hour’s silence he can say, The one thing I cannot stand is dampness… That’s all, it took him an hour to work that out.

I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen.

Sorrow is the rust of the soul and activity will cleanse and brighten it.

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

The sense of an entailed disadvantage – the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender.