Ralph Waldo Emerson

Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods loved him because men hated him.

Life too near paralyses art.

The basis of good manners is self-reliance.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God’s handwriting – a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.

Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.

Every man is a consumer and ought to be a producer.

Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.

But real action is in silent moments. The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our choice of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and the like, but in a silent thought by the wayside as we walk; in a thought which revises our entire manner of life, and says.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

Fortune makes a fool of those she favors too much.

The greatest homage we can pay truth is to use it.

Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.

It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances.

Cruel with guilt, and daring with despair, the midnight murderer bursts the faithless bar; invades the sacred hour of silent rest and leaves, unseen, a dagger in your breast.

Until we have seen someone’s darkness, we don’t really know who they are. Until we have forgiven someone’s darkness , we don’t really know what love is.

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

All promise outruns performance.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity… The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

Choose people who lift you up.