Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature hates calculators.

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Talent for talent’s sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.

Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual.

Don’t be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don’t bewail and moan. Omit the negative propositions. Challenge us with incessant affirmatives. Don’t waste yourself in rejection, or bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

It always seems impossible until its done.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.

He that has more knowledge than judgment, is made for another man’s use more than his own.

One little bird not larger than a sparrow, it may have been a Phalarope, would alight on the turbulent surface where the breakers were five or six feet high, and float buoyantly there like a duck, cunningly taking to its wings and lifting itself a few feet through the air over the foaming crest of each breaker, but sometimes outriding safely a considerable billow which hid it some seconds, when its instinct told it that it would not break. It was a little creature thus to sport with the ocean, but it was as perfect a success in its way as the breakers in theirs.

I am not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

No one has a prosperity so high and firm that two or three words can’t dishearten it.

Raphael paints wisdom; Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

Who questions much, shall learn much, and retain much.

What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.

There is a crack in everything God has made.