Ralph Waldo Emerson

Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness, — whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so.

A great man is always willing to be little.

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other; given the upper, to find the under side.

The surest poison is time.

Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.

How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!

If a man’s fortune does not fit him, it is like the shoe in the story; if too large it trips him up, if too small it pinches him.

There is nothing assured to mortals.

Follow your own passion – not your parents’, not your teachers’- yours.

One can resist the invasion of an army, but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.

The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.

America is another name for opportunity.

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

No member of society has the right to teach any doctrine contrary to what society holds to be true.

To delay justice, is injustice.

If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

Poetry puts starch in your backbone so you can stand, so you can compose your life.