Ralph Waldo Emerson

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.

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

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

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

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

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

The first wealth is health.

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

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

An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.

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

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.

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.

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.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.