Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is short, but there is always time for courtesy.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

Be not the slave of your own past – plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.

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.

Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology.

Lord save us all from a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than the arguments of its opposers.

While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God’s creation.

Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws.

There is always a best way of doing everything.

God hangs the greatest weights upon the smallest wires.

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.

Haven’t you learned yet that I put something more than whisky into my speeches.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil.

My life is a struggle.