Ralph Waldo Emerson

Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual.

No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself.

Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.

Oh man! There is no planet sun or star could hold you, if you but knew what you are.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.

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

Religion is nothing else but love of God and man.

Most people do not pray; they only beg.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like as long as somebody loves you.

The sense of an entailed disadvantage – the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender.

After a few months’ acquaintance with European coffee, one’s mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed.

Ignorance… is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

Every great achievement is the victory of a flaming heart.

No two men can be half an hour together but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.

He that does good for good’s sake seeks neither paradise nor reward, but he is sure of both in the end.

The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.

The surest poison is time.