Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)
American philosopher, essayist, and poet.
Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence.
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.
There is no knowledge that is not power.
Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.
The music that can deepest reach,
And cure all ill, is cordial speech.
Heroism feels and never reasons and therefore is always right.
The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution.
Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see — not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.
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".
Is not every man sometimes a radical in politics? Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick, or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused; when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.
Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
For what avail the plough or sail,
Or land or life, if freedom fail?
We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous society the influence of character is in its infancy.
A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.
I fancy I need more than another to speak (rather than write), with such a formidable tendency to the lapidary style. I build my house of boulders.
Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.
Men suffer all their life long, under the foolish superstition that they can be cheated. But it is as impossible for a man to be cheated by any one but himself, as for a thing to be and not to be at the same time.
The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.
Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.