Ralph Waldo Emerson

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

Every man is a deity. A god playing the fool.

I wish to say what I think and feel today, with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.

Any man who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair.

In the sublimest flights of the soul, rectitude is never surmounted, love is never outgrown.

Be Silly. Be honest. Be kind.

Every man I meet was in some way my superior.

He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.