Ralph Waldo Emerson

He is great who confers the most benefits.

For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?

Half a man’s wisdom goes with his courage.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

It is always so pleasant to be generous, though very vexatious to pay debts.

Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. Let them be your only diet, drink, and botanical medicines.

If the Almighty were to rebuild the world and asked me for advice, I would have English Channels round every country. And the atmosphere would be such that anything which attempted to fly would be set on fire.

Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.

Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party.

In order to fully realize how bad a popular play can be, it is necessary to see it twice.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.

Great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.

If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man’s self.

We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.

Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.

Philebus was saying that enjoyment and pleasure and delight, and the class of feelings akin to them, are a good to every living being, whereas I contend, that not these, but wisdom and intelligence and memory, and their kindred, right opinion and true reasoning, are better and more desirable than pleasure

Exploring the mysteries of myself and the world. Sensual, powerful, wise… on my path…