Ralph Waldo Emerson

Outside among your fellows, among strangers, you must preserve appearances, a hundred things you cannot do; but inside, the terrible freedom.

The secret of drunkenness is, that it insulates us in thought, whilst it unites us in feeling.

All poets have signalized their consciousness of rare moments when they were superior to themselves, -when a light, a freedom, a power came to them which lifted them to performances far better than they could reach at other times.

Life is a boundless privilege, and when you pay for your ticket, and get into the car, you have no guess what good company you shall find there.

Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding

Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is due to the triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it

I find nothing in fables more astonishing than my experience in every hour. One moment of a man's life is a fact so stupendous as to take the luster out of fiction.

The world is his who has money to go over it.

In the woods we return to reason and faith.

The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary.

Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal.

What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all.

No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude.

Take the place and attitude to which you see your unquestionable right, and all men acquiesce.

If a man's eye is on the Eternal, his intellect will grow.

The education of the will is the object of our existence.

You cannot make a cheap palace.

That which we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so.