Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are prisoners of ideas.

Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.

I know of no such unquestionable badge and ensign of a sovereign mind as that of tenacity of purpose.

I didn’t find my friends; the good Lord gave them to me.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

Those who cross the sea change only the climate, not their character.

Do or do not. There is no try.

One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.

She has taken a patronizing fancy to her father, the Admiral, who accepts her condescension gratefully as age brings more and more home to him the futility of his social position.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.

This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, slow rises worth by poverty depressed.

The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough.

The world will never be long without some good reason to hate the unhappy; their real faults are immediately detected, and if those are not sufficient to sink them into infamy, an additional weight of calumny will be super added.

Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.

A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning’s greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.

The human race was always interesting and we know by its past that it will always continue so, monotonously.

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.