Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year."

"Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science."

"A third illusion haunts us, that a long duration, as a year, a decade, a century, is valuable. But an old French sentence says, "God works in moments," — "En peu d'heure Dieu labeure." We ask for long life, but 't is deep life, or grand moments, that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical. Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance, — what ample borrowers of eternity they are! Life culminates and concentrates; and Homer said, "The Gods ever give to mortals their appointed share of reason only on one day.""

"Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines."

"'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear."

"Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good."

"We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count."

"There is no knowledge that is not power."

"Hitch your wagon to a star."

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

"The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most."

"The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out."

"Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun."

"Nature paints the best part of a picture, carves the best parts of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and speaks the best part of the oration."

"A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal."

"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."

"Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age."

"Nothing can be preserved that is not good."

"Never read any book that is not a year old."

"I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue."

"Science does not know its debt to imagination."

"Alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time."

"Music is the poor man's Parnassus."

"The imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man."

"Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy."

"I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared "that the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow"."

"Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary."

"The law of the table is beauty, a respect to the common soul of the guests. Everything is unreasonable which is private to two or three, or any portion of the company. Tact never violates for a moment this law; never intrudes the orders of the house, the vices of the absent, or a tariff of expenses, or professional privacies; as we say, we never “talk shop” before company. Lovers abstain from caresses, and haters from insults, while they sit in one parlor with common friends."

"This world belongs to the energetic."

"Every really able man, in whatever direction he work,—a man of large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter,—if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be."

"Every artist was first an amateur."

"Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. No hope so bright but is the beginning of its own fulfillment."

"Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master at some point, and in that, I learn of him."

"A good symbol is the best argument and is a missionary to persuade thousands."

"Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, and no force of character can make any stand against good wit."

"The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible."

"Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors."

"In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity."

"Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody."

"The heroic cannot be the common, nor can the common be heroic."

"The gods sell anything to everybody at a fair price."

"Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it."

"The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it."

"A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word just as good."

"Genius borrows nobly. When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: "Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life.""

"By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote."

"Now shall we say that only the first men were well alive, and the existing generation is invalided and degenerate? ... A more subtle and severe criticism might suggest that some dislocation has befallen the race; that men are off their centre; that multitudes of men do not live with Nature, but behold it as exiles. People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in the world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority."

"We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim. The Past is for us; but the sole terms on which it can become ours are its subordination to the Present. Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor. We must not tamper with the organic motion of the soul."

"Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent."

"In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent."