Ralph Waldo Emerson

The never-ending task of self improvement.

All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.

In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.

Tomorrow is an old deceiver, and his cheat never grows stale.

If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.

Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.

Love is only one of many passions.

I want someone with the proven strength to persevere, someone who knows this job and takes it seriously, someone who understands that the issues a president faces are not black and white and cannot be boiled down to 140 characters.

Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

Whether you come from a council estate or a country estate, your success will be determined by your own confidence and fortitude.

In his private heart no man much respects himself.

As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course.

A country-bred man can always learn to get on with city people, but a town-bred fellah never gets the real hang of the country. You can put city polish on a man, but by golly, it seems you can’t ever rub it off him.

Nothing does reason more right, than the coolness of those that offer it: For Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders, than from the arguments of its opposers.

I have found men to be more kind than I expected, and less just.