Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities.

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

See only that thou work and thou canst not escape the reward.

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.

The first farmer was the first man. All historic nobility rests on the possession and use of land.

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

Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.

He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

Judged by every standard which history has applied to Governments, the Soviet Government of Russia is one of the worst tyrannies that has ever existed in the world. It accords no political rights. It rules by terror. It punishes political opinions. It suppresses free speech. It tolerates no newspapers but its own. It persecutes Christianity with a zeal and a cunning never equalled since the times of the Roman Emperors. It is engaged at this moment in trampling down the peoples of Georgia and executing their leaders by hundreds.

There are those that are void of all mercy, but when it comes the time that they are on their knees, they plead for it. Those that were born with the art of deception, never sincere with their words or actions. But mercy is not theirs to take, only for you to give. Never compromise your standards, your beliefs and become like the ones who you are fighting against, but stay resolute to who you are.

Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.

In fine, he that is drunk is not a Man: Because he is so long void of Reason, that distinguishes a Man from a Beast.

Nothing makes a man so selfish as work.

Don’t seek, don’t search, don’t ask, don’t knock, don’t demand — relax!

No matter how carefully you plan your goals they will never be more than pipe dreams unless you pursue them with gusto.

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.

The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.

Man was made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.

Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and regarding the care of the commonwealth as a kind of common property which, like the air and the water, belongs to everybody, I set myself to consider in what way mankind might be best served, and what service I was myself best fitted by nature to perform.