Ralph Waldo Emerson

In nature nothing can be given. All things are sold.

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.

It is always so pleasant to be generous, though very vexatious to pay debts.

There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right.

The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe; the key to all ages is – Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men, at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, and fear.

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.

To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as mortals.

It all depends on you. You can go on sleeping forever, you can wake up right this moment.

Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

Don’t learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world.

I have lived with several Zen masters – all of them cats.

I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.

To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.

I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

Sobriety, severity, and self-respect are the foundations of all true sociality.

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life — some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed — because all their teaching has been, that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this defense against passionate affliction even more than men.

Those who attain any excellence, commonly spend life in one pursuit; for excellence is not often gained upon easier terms.

The most luxurious possession, the richest treasure anybody has, is his personal dignity.