Ralph Waldo Emerson

He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests; he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness.

The foolish man wonders at the unusual, but the wise man at the usual.

Look sharply after your own thoughts. They come unlooked for, like a new bird seen on your trees, and, if you turn to your usual task, disappear; and you shall never find that perception again; never, I say-but perhaps years, ages, and I know not what events and worlds my lie between you and its return.

This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

Every man contemplates an angel in his future self.

What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour?

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself.

Work and thou canst escape the reward; whether the work be fine or course, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought.

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. . . .

The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity

Of all tools, an observatory is the most sublime. . . . What is so good in a college as an observatory? The sublime attaches to the door and to the first stair you ascent, that this is the road to the stars.

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue.

Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.

We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities.

Every action has an ancestor of a thought.

There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato:-never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to every generation these come duly down, for the sake of those few persons, as if God brought them written in his hand.

Some of your griefs you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived, But what torments of grief you've endured From evils that never arrived.