Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our spontaneous action is always the best. You cannot, with your best deliberation and heed, come so close to any question as your spontaneous glance shall bring you.

It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind.

As soon as there is life there is danger.

The thirst for adventure is the vent which Destiny offers; a war, a crusade, a gold mine, a new country, speak to the imagination and offer swing and play to the confined powers.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

Why do the words I want to say, struggle to come out of my mouth. Why does fear have such a grip over me. I shouldn’t have to battle to say all the complimentary things I so desperately want to share. It shouldn’t be this hard, that I have to force myself; it’s wrong that such loving words, should have to be spoken under such duress. I’m aware of how wrong it is, but withholding is all I have known, even though I desire so badly to share my thoughts and feelings with you, as freely as you do with me.

I believe that he was really sorry that people would not believe he was sorry that he was not more sorry.

When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices.

Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.

I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.

It is necessary to hope… for hope itself is happiness.

I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won’t.

A minute of thought is greater than an hour of talk.

It is seldom that the miserable of the world can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.

People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable.

Some of your grief you have cured, and lived to survive; but what torments of pain have you endured that haven’t as yet arrived.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree. We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.