Ralph Waldo Emerson

Great people are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

If a man owns land, the land owns him.

Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one’s self?

A man’s wife has more power over him than the state has.

A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.

If you lose money you lose much, If you lose friends you lose more, If you lose faith you lose all.

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.

Those who trust us educate us.

The habit of looking on the best side of every event is worth more than a thousand pounds a years.

Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.

Knowledge always demands increase; it is like fire, which must first be kindled by some external agent, but will afterwards always propagate itself.

I shall strike the stars with my unlifted head.

The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.

I never think at all when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them both well.

Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender.

No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.

Events can neither be regarded as a series of adventures nor strung on the thread of a preconceived moral. They must obey their own laws.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.