Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.

But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps.

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance.

But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.

My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.

Go where he will, the wise man is at home, His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome.

It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.

To the men of this world, to the animal strength and spirits, to the men of practical power, whilst immersed in it, the man of ideas appears out of his reason. They alone gave reason.

Society, to be sure, does not like this very well; it saith, Whoso goes to walk alone, accuses the whole world; he declares all to be unfit to be his companions; it is very uncivil, nay, insulting; Society will retaliate.

I am grown by sympathy a little eager and sentimental, but leave me alone, and I should relish every hour and what it brought me, the pot-luck of the day, as heartily as the oldest gossip in the bar-room.

In talking with scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder companions those years of boyhood which alone could give imaginative literature a religious and infinite quality in their esteem.

Throughout the ages there have always been those who have been willing to go beyond the norms and reach for that unknown and distant star.

Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

Love is like a hunter, who cares not for the game when once caught, which he may have pursued with the most intense and breathless eagerness. Love is strongest in pursuit; friendship in possession.

God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth.

Only to youth will spring be spring.

Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.

Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the omnipresent God bursts through everywhere

The last change in our point of view gives the whole world a pictorial air.