Ralph Waldo Emerson

When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.

Self-trust is the essence of heroism.

Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.

Fear always springs from ignorance.

We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.

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

Lord save us all from a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

Be yourself. Follow your instincts. Success depends, at least in part, on the ability to carry it off.

Believe that each day that shines on you is your last.

To accept some idea of truth without experiencing it is like a painting of a cake on paper which you can not eat.

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.

Men being born with a title to perfect freedom and uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature . . . no one can be put out of his estate and subjected to the political view of another, without his consent.

We must not inquire too curiously into motives… They are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.

If you employed study, thinking, and planning time daily, you could develop and use the power that can change the course of your destiny.

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

An honest man is always a child.

The sky was the color of hard crimson, dripping down a canvas, the moon splashed silver across red. Her soothing balm healing my soul in swathes of calmness, I breathe in her tides and let my body be washed ashore, lying in the sands of eternity.

Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights…sexual intercourse!…His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.

It’s all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.