Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for competitors.

I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

Today is a king in disguise.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

She had no need to ask why he had come. She knew as certainly as if he had told her that he was here to be where she was.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.

I think you’re running into a lot of trouble if your idea of foreplay is, ‘Brace yourself honey, here I come!’

To resent efficiency is a mark of inefficiency.

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

We have finished the job, what shall we do with the tools?

Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value.

Its a choice. You just have to decide that I’m not going to put my energy there. I’m going to decide to let this go. It’s your choice. You can embrace it, you can become a prisoner of bitterness and resentment anger and victim city, or you can just say ‘I’m going to live my life and be happy’.

To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.

There’s no limit to the things you can do.

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through one’s head.

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

Something magical has happened to me: like a dream when one feels frightened and creepy, and suddenly wakes up to the knowledge that no such terrors exist. I have wakened up.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

Feelings are often born from the matrix of conditions beyond your control. Let them just pass through, like a cloud in the sky.