Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our best history is still poetry.

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.

The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.

Be true to your own act and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant to break the monotony of a decorous age.

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.

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.

The most difficult We do not deal in facts when we are contemplating ourselves.

Everything intercepts us from ourselves.

What a new face courage puts on everything!

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.

At the end of my life, with just one breath left, if you come, I’ll sit up and sing.

Patience and diligence, like faith, remove mountains.

Wherever you are, be there totally.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

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

Its proper use is to amuse the idle, and relax the studious, and dilute the full meals of those who cannot use exercise, and will not use abstinence.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.

It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God.

It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?… What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.