Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

In nature nothing can be given. All things are sold.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

The thirst for adventure is the vent which Destiny offers; a war, a crusade, a gold mine, a new country, speak to the imagination and offer swing and play to the confined powers.

I cannot forgive a scholar his homeless despondency.

Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.

If thou wouldst rule well, thou must rule for God; and to do that, thou must be ruled by him who has given to kings his grace to command themselves and their subjects, and to the people the grace to obey God and their kings.

Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

Haven’t you learned yet that I put something more than whisky into my speeches.

I was the same old me. Just like the Moon yesterday. But because of all the other factors that came to play, the darkness, the brightness, the blood red color. They all were a reflection, a projection due to the perfect set of circumstances. The Moon was still the Moon. But it was still labeled the Super Blue Blood Moon, Just so we can have some understanding, but, again I’ll state, the Moon was still just the Moon, just like I was still just me. Whatever you project on me, and I reflect back, doesn’t then make me become a new person, it’s just a reflection of your projection. I am still just me.

Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans –which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.

Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.

Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

I am certainly not one of those who need to be prodded. In fact, if anything, I am the prod.

Humility like the darkness, reveals the heavenly lights.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

Extended empires are like expanded gold, exchanging solid strength for feeble splendor.

The man is either mad, or he is making verses.

Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one’s heart; but death is a splendid thing –a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.