Ralph Waldo Emerson

Not gold but only men can makeA people great and strong;Men who for truth and honors sakeStand fast and suffer long. Brave men who work while others sleep,Who dare while others flyThey build a nations pillars deepAnd lift them to the sky.

Men are what their mothers made them.

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.

Often a certain abdication of prudence and foresight is an element of success.

Nature hates calculators.

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds – not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but – a hatred of all injury.

The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?

Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

Our most important task is to transform our consciousness so that violence is no longer an option for us in our personal lives, that understanding that a world of peace is possible only if we relate to each other as peaceful beings, one individual at a time.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

How many are the things I can do without!

I believe that the most important single thing, beyond discipline and creativity is daring to dare.

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.

When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.

He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon a little.

This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

Human beings must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.