Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

Wherever the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.

As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.

Beauty without expression is boring.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

We must be our own before we can be another's.

An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

Our best thoughts come from others.

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

The first wealth is health.