Ralph Waldo Emerson

As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.

Earth laughs in flowers.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.

Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable.

For most men, and most circumstances, pleasure –tangible material prosperity in this world -is the safest test of virtue. Progress has ever been through the pleasures rather than through the extreme sharp virtues, and the most virtuous have leaned to excess rather than to asceticism.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

Writers are the engineers of human souls.

People have discovered that they can fool the devil; but they can’t fool the neighbors.

The physical world, including our bodies, is a response of the observer. We create our bodies as we create the experience of our world.

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.

Religion is nothing else but love of God and man.

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

Friendship increases in visiting friends, but in visiting them seldom.

All colors will agree in the dark.

I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.