Ralph Waldo Emerson

The measure of a great leader, is their success in bringing everyone around to their opinion twenty years later.

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

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.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

The glory of friendship is not in the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is in the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him.

Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

Don’t seek, don’t search, don’t ask, don’t knock, don’t demand — relax!

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.

Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.

Kings are not born they are made by universal hallucination.

Moral of the Work. In war: resolution. In defeat: defiance. In victory: magnanimity. In peace: goodwill.

I encourage you to live with life. Be courageous, adventurous. Give us a tomorrow, more than we deserve.

You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have truly lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.

As a rule, adversity reveals genius and prosperity hides it.

The pen is the tongue of the mind.