Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is always a best way of doing everything.

There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace, and not pollute the morning.

What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

Whatever limits us we call fate.

It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him.

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.

There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination. Living there, you’ll be free if you truly wish to be.

A crank is someone with a new idea – until it catches on.

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.

A bargain is something you can’t use at a price you can’t resist.

Nature has given us two ears, two eyes, and but one tongue-to the end that we should hear and see more than we speak.

Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.

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.

Surrender is faith that the power of love can accomplish anything… even when you can not foresee the outcome.

When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.

Union may be strength, but it is mere blind brute strength unless wisely directed.

The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.

There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

Injustice in the end produces independence.