Ralph Waldo Emerson

No matter how often you are defeated, you are born to victory.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

America is another name for opportunity.

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.

Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

Was there ever such an autumn? And yet there was never such a panic and hard times in the commercial world. The merchants and banks are suspending and failing all the country over, but not the sandbanks, solid and warm, and streaked with bloody blackberry vines.You may run upon them as much as you please – even as the crickets do, and find their account in it. They are the stockholders in these banks, and I hear them creaking their content.

To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.

There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men – that is genius.

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.

It is not given to us to peer into the mysteries of the future. Still, I avow my hope and faith, sure and inviolate, that in the days to come the British and American peoples will for their own safety and for the good of all walk together side by side in majesty, in justice, and in peace.

To be free minded and cheerfully disposed at hours of meat and sleep and of exercise is one of the best precepts of long lasting.

The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some area of native land where it may get the love of tender kinship from the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead.

I was not the lion, but it fell to me to give the lion’s roar.

We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.

I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.