Ralph Waldo Emerson

No orator can top the one who can give good nicknames.

Men are what their mothers made them.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

When I was praised I lost my time, for instantly I turned around to look at the work I had thought slightly of, and that day I made nothing new.

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

The city is recruited from the country.

This body of mine is my teacher. This heart of mine, my guide. My dear head struggles to make sense of it all whilst my hands gently remind me to trust and let go.

Nakedness is uncomely, as well in mind as body, and it addeth no small reverence to men’s manners and actions if they be not altogether open. Therefore set it down: That a habit of secrecy is both politic and moral.

Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.

Personally, I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.

Without passion, you don’t have energy. Without energy, you have nothing.

Duties are not performed for duty’s sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty -the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.

A name pronounced is the recognition of the individual to whom it belongs. He who can pronounce my name aright, he can call me, and is entitled to my love and service.

The Chinese said of themselves several thousand years ago: China is a sea that salts all the waters that flow into it. Theres another Chinese saying about their country which is much more modernit dates only from the fourth century. This is the saying: The tail of China is large and will not be wagged. I like that one. The British democracy approves the principles of movable party heads and unwaggable national tails. It is due to the working of these important forces that I have the honour to be addressing you at this moment.

One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.

Usually the modest person passes for someone reserved, the silent for a sullen person

A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.