Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.

We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.

My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock should find the time in my face.

The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.

Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.

Every man is an impossibility until he is born.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

For every why he had a wherefore.

I think there is something, more important than believing: Action! The world is full of dreamers, there aren’t enough who will move ahead and begin to take concrete steps to actualize their vision.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

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.

Wisdom begins in wonder.

In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine.

I was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolisher.

Without frugality none can be rich, and with it very few would be poor.

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?… What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.

Blame is safer than praise.

All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.

Always two there are, no more, no less. A master and an apprentice.

Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint.