Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.

All mankind love a lover.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other; given the upper, to find the under side.

The most dangerous thing is illusion.

Wherever there is power there is age.

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my own constitution; the only wrong what is against it.

Do not tell me of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.

He who has begun has half done. Dare to be wise; begin.

The jealous are troublesome to others, but torment to themselves.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air. It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog’s life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.

I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

I talk democracy to these men and women. I tell them that they have the vote, and that theirs is the kingdom and the power and the glory. I say to them You are supreme: exercise your power. They say, That’s right: tell us what to do; and I tell them. I say Exercise our vote intelligently by voting for me. And they do. That’s democracy; and a splendid thing it is too for putting the right men in the right place.

Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.

There are charms made only for distant admiration.

A wise man makes what he learns his own, the other shows he is but a copy or a collection at most.

That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.