Ralph Waldo Emerson

Imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man.

Each man has his own vocation; his talent is his call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him.

The soul refuses limits and always affirms an optimism, never a pessimism.

The great object of Education should be commensurate with the object of life. It should be a moral one; to teach self-trust: to inspire the youthful man with an interest in himself; with a curiosity touching his own nature; to acquaint him with the resources of his mind, and to teach him that there is all his strength.

He that can heroically endure adversity will bear prosperity with equal greatest of the soul; for the mind that cannot be dejected by the former is not likely to be transported without the latter.

The secret is the answer to all that has been, all that is, and all that will ever be.

The measure of mental health is the disposition to find good everywhere.

America means opportunity, freedom, power.

There is a capacity of virtue in us, and there is a capacity of vice to make your blood creep.

Crime and punishment grow out of one stem.

Life is a festival only to the wise.

All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.

You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.

Every man is an infinitely repelling orb, and holds his individual being on that condition.

Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in.

The wise man always throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his weak point.

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

We can see well into the past; we can guess shrewdly into the future, but that which is rolled up and muffled in impenetrable folds is today.

The Englishman who has lost his fortune is said to have died of a broken heart.

Man is physical as well as metaphysical, a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

A cultivated man, wise to know and bold to perform, is the end to which nature works.