Ralph Waldo Emerson

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

There is 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.

The sea, washing the equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid, and the power and empire that follow it… Beware of me, it says, but if you can hold me, I am the key to all the lands.

How much of human life is lost in waiting.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

It is easier to stay out than get out.

Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means – one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

Today is the oldest you’ve ever been, and the youngest you’ll ever be again.

The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right.

To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all.

Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of the human mind.

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.

Every stroke our fury strikes is sure to hit ourselves at last.

I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

Life is what you make it. Always has been, always will be.

Courage is rightly considered the foremost of the virtues, for upon it, all others depend.

I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?

He may justly be numbered among the benefactors of mankind, who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may early be impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to occur habitually to the mind.

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.