Ralph Waldo Emerson

The next best thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men – that is genius.

Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God’s handwriting – a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.

Valor consists in the power of self recovery.

There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

Who ever is out of patience is out of possession of their soul.

The mind is refrigerated by interruption; the thoughts are diverted from the principal subject; the reader is weary, he suspects not why; and at last throws away the book, which he has too diligently studied.

The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed, there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennui s, vanish, all duties even.

Justice is my being allowed to do whatever I like. Injustice is whatever prevents my doing so.

Lack of money is the root of all evil.

Life must be filled up, and the man who is not capable of intellectual pleasures must content himself with such as his senses can afford.

You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.

As peace is the end of war, so to be idle is the ultimate purpose of the busy.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

I do not hold that we should rearm in order to fight. I hold that we should rearm in order to parley.

Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Moms. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.

Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.

Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.

Guilt, regret, resentment, sadness and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past and not enough presence.