Ralph Waldo Emerson

Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.

Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.

The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe; the key to all ages is – Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men, at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, and fear.

The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

What your heart thinks is great, is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.

The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the characters of individuals.

There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.

Any 20 year-old who isn’t a liberal doesn’t have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn’t a conservative doesn’t have a brain.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

Do what you love. Know you own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

You must get your living by loving, or at least half your life is a failure.

Very often, say what you will, a knave is only a fool.

Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Not to be provok’d is best: But if mov’d, never correct till the Fume is spent; For every Stroke our Fury strikes, is sure to hit our selves at last.

No matter how much or how little I knew technically, I was able to get the best out of people I worked with.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same kind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.

I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious – except he purposely shut the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force.

Anger is short madness