Ralph Waldo Emerson

Courage charms us, because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind.

Make yourself necessary to somebody.

Stay at home in your mind. Don’t recite other people’s opinions. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

The people are to be taken in small doses.

The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.

They teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master.

Happiness is not a state to arrive at, rather, a manner of traveling.

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

There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find an Englishman doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.

All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.

The eye is easily frightened.

The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.

I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.

All good things are cheap: all bad are very dear.

The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.

A good scare is worth more than good advice.

Think with your whole body.

Union may be strength, but it is mere blind brute strength unless wisely directed.

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

I hate mankind, for I think of myself as one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.