Ralph Waldo Emerson

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.

What your heart thinks is great, is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?

One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected

Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity: no really self-respecting woman would take advantage of it.

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity. The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

Well, dearie, men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability. But you can’t blame them for that, can you?

Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.

You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the Government. And, with due respect for these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the Capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.

We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead – and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.

Your depression is connected to your insolence and refusal to praise.

I only desire sincere relations with the worthiest of my acquaintance, that they may give me an opportunity once in a year to speak the truth.

In his private heart no man much respects himself.

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some area of native land where it may get the love of tender kinship from the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead.

Far too many executives have become more concerned with the four P’s – pay, perks, power and prestige – rather than making profits for shareholders.

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans –which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.