Ralph Waldo Emerson

Man's actions are the picture book of his creeds.

We judge of man's wisdom by his hope.

Always do what you are afraid to do.

If you want to be great and successful, choose people who are great and successful and walk side by side with them.

A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?

No one has a prosperity so high and firm that two or three words can't dishearten it.

A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing -to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine.

The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.

How much of human life is lost in waiting.

Let not a man guard his dignity, but let his dignity guard him.

Go, speed the stars of Thought On to their shining goals; - The sower scatters broad his seed, The wheat thou strew'st be souls.

Nature forever puts a premium on reality. What is done for effect is seen to be done for effect; what is done for love is felt to be done for love. A man inspires affection and honor because he was not lying in wait for these.

The philosophy of waiting is sustained by all the oracles of the universe.

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun.

The judge weighs the arguments and puts a brave face on the matter, and since there must be a decision, decides as he can, and hopes he has done justice and given satisfaction to the community

Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.

The universal soul is the alone creator of the useful and the beautiful; therefore to make anything useful or beautiful, the individual must be submitted to the universal mind.

I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action.