Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

The shot heard round the world.

I wish to say what I think and feel today, with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.

We love force and we care very little how it is exhibited.

We fancy men are individuals; so are pumpkins; but every pumpkin in the field goes through every point of pumpkin history.

Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?

Women see better than men. Men see lazily, if they do not expect to act. Women see quite without any wish to act.

Nothing great ever happened without enthusiasm.

Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.

I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger. I wish to break all prisons.

Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs.

Slavery it is that makes slavery; freedom, freedom. The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings.

The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

Perception is a mirror not a fact. And what I look on is my state of mind, reflected outward.

There is always room for a person of force and they make room for many.

In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout, and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep.

Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?

The simplicity of the universe is very different from the simplicity of a machine. The simplicity of nature is not that which may be easily read but is inexhaustible. The last analysis can no wise be made.

Religion is as effectively destroyed by bigotry as by indifference.