Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)
American philosopher, essayist, and poet.
Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.
The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.
I read your piece on Plato. Holmes, when you strike at a king, you must kill him.
The Religion that is afraid of science dishonours God and commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it legislates, tyrannizes over a village of God's empires but is not the immutable universal law. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion and making way for truth.
Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
But these young scholars who invade our hills,
Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,
And travelling often in the cut he makes,
Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
And all their botany is Latin names.
A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,— congestion of the brain, apoplexy and strangulation.
Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.
The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.
O tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire;
One morn is in the mighty heaven,
And one in our desire.
Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort.
The world is his, who has money to go over it.
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".
Happy is the house that shelters a friend!
You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.
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.
Blessed are those who have no talent!
The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives.