Ralph Waldo Emerson

Most of the shadows of life are caused by standing in our own sunshine.

Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone.

That which we call character is a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means. It is conceived of as a certain undemonstrable force, a familiar or genius, by whose impulses the man is guided, but whose counsels he cannot impart.

He is great who confers the most benefits.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.

If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.

And all the while I thought I was drowning, I was actually the one holding my head under the water.

Human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning.

Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.

Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats.

Justice delayed is justice denied.

The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right.

The foundations of a person are not in matter but in spirit.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.

Practice is this life, and realization is this life, and this life is revealed right here and now.

Hate has caused a lot of problems in this world, but it has not solved one yet.

Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.

The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.

There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.