Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men,...

Love of beauty is Taste. The creation of beauty is Art.

To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen...

Only so much do I know, as I have lived

Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.

Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words

Remarkable trait in the American Character is the union, not very infrequent, of Yankee cleverness with spiritualism.

Poverty consist in feeling poor.

Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; – for causes which are unpenetrated

Unhappy is the man whom man can make unhappy

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.

Do the thing we fear, and the death of fear is certain.

Be not the slave of your own past … plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience, that shall...

Imitation cannot go above its model.

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man,When Duty whispers low, ‘Thou must,’ The youth whispers, ‘I can.

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.

To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not?

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

The landscape belongs to the person who looks at it…” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

There are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat.

Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs.

As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain sublime assurance of success, but as soon as honied words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one...

Hitch your wagon to a star.

Never self-possessed, or prudent, love is all abandonment.

Noblesse oblige; or, superior advantages bind you to larger generosity

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other

The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.

Do what you know and perception is converted into character.

The finished man of the world must eat every apple once.

The State must follow, and not lead, the character and progress of the citizen.

Our spontaneous action is always the best. You cannot, with your best deliberation and heed, come so close to any question as your spontaneous glance shall bring you.

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.

Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present

A great man stands on God. A small man on a great man.

All are needed by each one; Nothing is fair or good alone

Beauty rests on necessities.

He built better than he knew; – / The conscious stone to beauty grew.

Nature never wears a mean appearance. When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense of mind.

In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes.

New arts destroy the old.

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

He that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves

Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.

Act, if you like, but you do it at your peril. Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted and who has not been the victim and slave of...

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.