Ralph Waldo Emerson

Raphael paints wisdom; Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.

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.

Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

All successful men have agreed in one thing – they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things.

Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

It is not given to us to peer into the mysteries of the future. Still, I avow my hope and faith, sure and inviolate, that in the days to come the British and American peoples will for their own safety and for the good of all walk together side by side in majesty, in justice, and in peace.

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

The way you think, the way you behave, the way you eat, can influence your life by 30 to 50 years.

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.

Believe that each day that shines on you is your last.

Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. Let them be your only diet, drink, and botanical medicines.

It requires nothing less than a chivalric feeling to sustain a conversation with a lady.

Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants.

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.

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

If thou wouldn’t conquer thy weakness thou must not gratify it.

Arguments of convenience lack integrity and inevitably trip you up.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly.