Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sorrow makes us children again.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.

If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.

The power which resides in man is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed.

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.

I am not bound over to swear allegiance to any master; where the storm drives me I turn in for shelter.

There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.

The jealous are troublesome to others, but a torment to themselves.

He is now rising from affluence to poverty.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.

Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.

It is your business when the wall next door catches fire.

Begin, be bold and venture to be wise.

In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.

Your own safety is at stake when your neighbor’s house is in flames.

No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.