Ralph Waldo Emerson

All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.

The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society.

It happened once that a youth and a maiden beheld each other in a public assembly for the first time

Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms.

Men are what their mothers made them.

In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place.

The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend.

Drag your thoughts away from your troubles… by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.

My emancipation don’t fit your equation.

The responsibility of tolerance lies in those who have the wider vision.

When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before.

Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price.

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all the management of human affairs.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

Amuse not thy self therefore with the numerous Opinions of the World, nor value thy self upon verbal Orthodoxy, Philosophy, or thy Skill in Tongues, or Knowledge of the Fathers; (too much the Business and Vanity of the World). But in this rejoyce, That thou knowest God, that is the Lord, who exerciseth loving Kindness, and Judgment; and Righteousness in the Earth.

Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est (Knowledge Itself Is Power)

If we had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes.

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.

Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.

In the scenery of spring, nothing is better, nothing worse; the flowering branches are; some long, some short.