Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our best thoughts come from others.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

The city is recruited from the country.

No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lift human life above the level of farce and give it some of the grace of tragedy.

Keeping your body healthy is an expression of gratitude to the whole cosmos; trees, clouds, everything.

Mountains will go into labour, and a silly little mouse will be born.

By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again – and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another’s and each obeying its own law.

It is admirable to consider how many Millions of People come into, and go out of the World, Ignorant of themselves, and of the World they have lived in.

Nothing is so exhilarating in life as to be shot at with no result.

When a man laughs at his troubles he loses a great many friends. They never forgive the loss of their prerogative.

That old law about ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do what is right.

The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day.

Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.

I am not able to instruct you. I can only tell that I have chosen wrong. I have passed my time in study without experience; in the attainment of sciences which can, for the most part, be but remotely useful to mankind. I have purchased knowledge at the expense of all the common comforts of life: I have missed the endearing elegance of female friendship, and the happy commerce of domestic tenderness.

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.

Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.