Ralph Waldo Emerson

Religion is as effectually destroyed by bigotry as by indifference.

A few strong instincts and a few plain rules suffice us.

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.

Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue. Every natural action is graceful; every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine.

Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint.

Beware what you set your heart upon. For it shall surely be yours.

He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

Don’t be afraid. Be focused. Be determined. Be hopeful. Be empowered.

Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change –only to give stability to one beautiful moment.

When any calamity has been suffered the first thing to be remembered is, how much has been escaped.

There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined.

The power which resides in man is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.

To be free minded and cheerfully disposed at hours of meat and sleep and of exercise is one of the best precepts of long lasting.

That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.

Sometimes if I see negative things it really doesn’t faze me, because you’ve got to be tough and you’ve got to be you.

It is a brave thing to have courage to be an individual; it is also, perhaps, a lonely thing. But it is better than not being an individual, which is to be nobody at all.

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.

To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know, I’ve done it a thousand times.

Usually the modest person passes for someone reserved, the silent for a sullen person.

They that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils.