Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life.

To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same fields, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.

The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourself.

Give all to love; Obey thy heart.

Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one's own sunshine.

The student is to read history actively and not passively.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.

To a dull mind all of nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men that is genius.

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

Nothing can work damage to me except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me and never am a real sufferer except by my own fault.

The secret of poetry is never explained,— is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, and the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, and knows not that they are such. 'T is as easy as breath. 'T is like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, and none knows what it is.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.