Ralph Waldo Emerson

Great people are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.

The god of victory is said to be one-handed, but peace gives victory on both sides.

Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.

This gives force to the strong — that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action.

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Was there ever such an autumn? And yet there was never such a panic and hard times in the commercial world. The merchants and banks are suspending and failing all the country over, but not the sandbanks, solid and warm, and streaked with bloody blackberry vines.You may run upon them as much as you please – even as the crickets do, and find their account in it. They are the stockholders in these banks, and I hear them creaking their content.

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

I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether.

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.

Do that which is assigned to you and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

I want to be free; to escape. I use my pen as oars; the paper as my boat. I fill these pages to keep me afloat. I ride the waves of turmoil, so I can paddle away to calmer seas.

The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone: the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.

The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.

You see things; and you say Why? But I dream things that never were; and I say Why not?

After a few months’ acquaintance with European coffee, one’s mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed.

What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man’s virtues the means of deceiving him.