Ralph Waldo Emerson

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

So of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more it remains.

Nothing astonishes people so much as common sense and plain dealing.

Religion is as effectually destroyed by bigotry as by indifference.

Life too near paralyses art.

What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.

We rarely find anyone who can say he has lived a happy life, and who, content with his life, can retire from the world like a satisfied guest.

Sense shines with a double luster when it is set in humility. An able yet humble man is a jewel worth a kingdom.

Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion?

Rebellions of the belly are the worst.

We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead – and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.

Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior.

A great man is always willing to be little.

A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts.

I have been breaking silence these twenty-three years and have hardly made a rent in it.

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

Obviously, as you grow up, no one’s ever 100 percent proud of every decision that they’ve made, and that’s OK. I think as long as you learn from your mistakes and don’t make them over and over again, you’re on the right path.

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.

I know that we will be the sufferers if we let great wrongs occur without exerting ourselves to correct them.

How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

The Public is merely a multiplied “me”.