Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.”

“Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams”

“All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.”

“Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting some on yourself.”

“To laugh often and much; to win the respect of the intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the beauty in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that one life has breathed easier because you lived here. This is to have succeeded.”

“The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.”

“When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.”

“The secret of poetry is never explained - is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, & the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, & knows not that they are such. 'Tis as easy as breath. 'Tis like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, & none knows what it is.”

“To fill the hour──that is happiness.”

“Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.”

“Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.”

“It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.”

“Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.”

“The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.”

“Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it--else it is none.”

“There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.”

“Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.”

“Every word was once a poem.”

“Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest.”

“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn”

“The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship”

“The life of truth is cold.”

“Emerson's own best insight into fame is in his essay on Character. "The most dismaying aspect of fame from the point of view of its possessor is not just that fame is generally disproportionate to actual achievement, but that the fame that we first assume to be a reward for work well done becomes instead an impossible promise of about future work. Fame casts an anticipatory chill over current efforts because it awakens expectations that can never fully be met".”

“Y se expresaron con sus propias palabras, no con las palabras de los demás hombres”

“The years teach much the days never know.”

“Time like space, is part of the permanent context of life. Time does not pass, we pass.”

“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”

“The good news is that the moment you decide that what you know is more important than what you have been taught to believe, you will have shifted gears in your quest for abundance. Success comes from within, not from without.”

“Love, and you shall be loved.”

“Be an opener of doors”

“Language is fossil Poetry.”

“He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.”

“I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.”

“Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.”

“Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.”

“Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.”