Ralph Waldo Emerson

No orator can top the one who can give good nicknames.

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.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Why should we be cowed by the name of Action?

All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.

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

My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologies. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought – with these I deal.

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

Self-preservation is the first law of nature.

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

Courage: the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.

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

Help a man against his will and you do the same as murder him.

I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

Rare virtues are like rare plants or animals, things that have not been able to hold their own in the world. A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner but more durable metal.

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.

We rail at trade, but the historian of the world will see that it was the principle of liberty; that it settled America, and destroyed feudalism, and made peace and keeps peace; that it will abolish slavery.

I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

It is better to be a young June-bug than an old bird of paradise.

Youth is unduly busy with pampering the outer person.

We may not pay Satan reverence, for that would be indiscreet, but we can at least respect his talents.