Ralph Waldo Emerson

We plant trees, we build stone houses, we redeem the waste, we make prospective laws, we found colleges and hospitals, for remote generations.

Our condition is like that of the poor wolves: if one of the flock wound himself, or so much as limp, the rest eat him up incontinently. That serene Power interposes the check upon the caprices and officiousness of our wills.

There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.

That which is best about conservatism, that which, though it cannot be expressed in detail, inspires reverence in all, is the Inevitable.

I cannot thank your law for my protection. I protect it. It is not in its power to protect me.

Whosoever hereafter shall name my name, shall not record a malefactor, but a benefactor in the earth.

All the meanness of my progenitors shall not bereave me of the power to make this hour and company fair and fortunate. Whatsoever streams of power and commodity flow to me, shall of me acquire healing virtue, and become fountains of safety.

It will never make any difference to a hero what the laws are. His greatness will shine and accomplish itself unto the end, whether they second him or not.

Such an irreconcilable antagonism of course must have a correspondent depth of seat in the human constitution. It is the opposition of Past and Future, of Memory and Hope, of the Understanding and the Reason. It is the primal antagonism, …

The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made.

Thought is all light, and publishes itself to the universe. It will speak, though you were dumb, by its own miraculous organ.

Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board.

Explore, and explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatise yourself, nor accept another's dogmatism.

When you shall say, "As others do, so will I. I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of the land, and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season." — then dies the man in you; …

You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence.

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 …

None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed.

Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves.

In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God?

The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself.

The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.

The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.

We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.

Do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.