Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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.

Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

Sincerity is the highest complement you can pay.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.

Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all the time thing. You don’t win once in a while… you don’t do things right once in a while… you do them right all the time. Winning is habit.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.

Better see rightly on a pound a week than squint on a million.

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.

Having power is not nearly as important as what you choose to do with it.

Some desire is necessary to keep life in motion, and he whose real wants are supplied must admit those of fancy.

So many fail because they don’t get started – they don’t go. They don’t overcome inertia. They don’t begin.

If women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race.

What do we live for; if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?

Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

When you cannot get a compliment in any other way pay yourself one.

My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.