Ralph Waldo Emerson

The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.

New arts destroy the old.

Our best thoughts come from others.

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

The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting.

The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

Images also help me find and realise ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people

Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.

In traveling, a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.

That’s what I can’t stand. I know I’ll bounce back, and that’s what I can’t stand.

If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.

You’ve got a big, big problem if you get caught up in what people say. If you’re gonna live for what people say, you might as well lay down and forget it. Because it doesn’t work that way.

A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.

Strivers achieve what dreamers believe.

Go anywhere in England where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people; and what do you always find? That the stables are the real center of the household.

Worthless people love only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

As the births of living creatures, at first, are ill-shapen: so are all Innovations, which are the births of time.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.