Ralph Waldo Emerson

Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

It is very easy in the world to live by the opinion of the world. It is very easy in solitude to be self-centered. But the finished man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

We do not count a man’s years until he has nothing else to count.

The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.

As long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.

We must not inquire too curiously into motives… They are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.

In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment and will never be more divine in the lapse of the ages. Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but when I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away but eternity remains.

Friendship is the next Pleasure we may hope for: And where we find it not at home, or have no home to find it in, we may seek it abroad. It is an Union of Spirits, a Marriage of Hearts, and the Bond thereof Vertue.

I believe that he was really sorry that people would not believe he was sorry that he was not more sorry.

Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.

I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.

Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.

Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.

It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.

To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.

Nothing does reason more right, than the coolness of those that offer it: For Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders, than from the arguments of its opposers.

Images also help me find and realise ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people