Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

But you must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know, that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.

The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings.

If a man owns land, the land owns him.

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.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

There is but one step from the Academy to the Fad.

There is properly no history; only biography.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.

A portion of mankind take pride in their vices and pursue their purpose; many more waver between doing what is right and complying with what is wrong.

Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is ajar.

Creativity is a consequence of action, not its motivation. Do what needs to be done and then ask whether it was possible.

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn’t got any.

The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.

Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

If in doubt, don’t. If still in doubt, do what’s right.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.