Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.

He is great who confers the most benefits.

There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.

We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.

The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.

Philebus was saying that enjoyment and pleasure and delight, and the class of feelings akin to them, are a good to every living being, whereas I contend, that not these, but wisdom and intelligence and memory, and their kindred, right opinion and true reasoning, are better and more desirable than pleasure

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.

The person that had took a bull by the tail once had learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn’t, and said a person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn’t ever going to grow dim or doubtful. Chances are, he isn’t likely to carry the cat that way again, either. But if he wants to, I say let him!

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

The betrothed and accepted lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden by her acceptance. She was heaven while he pursued her, but she cannot be heaven if she stoops to one such as he!

The glory of friendship is not in the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is in the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him.

Friends are true Twins in Soul; they Sympathize in every thing, and have the Love and Aversion. One is not happy without the other, nor can either of them be miserable alone. As if they could change Bodies, they take their turns in Pain as well as in Pleasure; relieving one another in their most adverse Conditions.What one enjoys, the other cannot Want. Like the Primitive Christians, they have all things in common, and no Property but in one another.

Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

The reward of a thing well done is having done it.

It is very hard to be simple enough to be good.

This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, slow rises worth by poverty depressed.

To be furious in religion is to be irreligiously religious.