Ralph Waldo Emerson

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare. While he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.

Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.

Act, if you like, but you do it at your peril. Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

Some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise.

Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.

No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic also.

A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.

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.

I never could keep a promise. I do not blame myself for this weakness, because the fault must lie in my physical organization. It is likely that such a very liberal amount of space was given to the organ which enables me to make promises that the organ which should enable me to keep them was crowded out. But I grieve not. I like no half-way things. I had rather have one faculty nobly developed than two faculties of mere ordinary capacity.

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

Our own life has to be our message.

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

There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to it.

How does it happen, Maecenas, that no one is content with that lot of which he has chosen or which chance has thrown his way, but praises those who follow a different course?

Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.

There was never a century nor a country that was short of experts who knew the Deity’s mind and were willing to reveal it.

He who postpones the hour of living is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.

Anger is short madness

Prudence is an attitude that keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy.

Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.

During my life, I have had a few nightmares which happened to me while I was wide awake.