Ralph Waldo Emerson

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

Every man passes his life in the search after friendship.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?

Life is short, but there is always time for courtesy.

How many attractions for us have our passing fellows in the streets, both male and female, which our ethics forbid us to express, which yet infuse so much pleasure into life. A lovely child, a handsome youth, a beautiful girl, a heroic man, a maternal woman, a venerable old man, charm us, though strangers, and we cannot say so, or look at them but for a moment.

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.

Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

Bravery is more important than perfection.- Kanye West

Sincerity is the highest complement you can pay.

If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.

He that embarks on the voyage of life will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind than the strokes of the oar; and many fold in their passage; while they lie waiting for the gale.

Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants.

Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.

I hate women because they always know where things are.

More knowledge may be gained of a man’s real character by a short conversation with one of his servants than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree and ended with his funeral.

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

A man’s true delight is to do the things he was made for.