Ralph Waldo Emerson

Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

That which builds is better than that which is built.

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

There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

The city is recruited from the country.

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

Act, if you like, but you do it at your peril. Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

In order to fully realize how bad a popular play can be, it is necessary to see it twice.

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

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare. While he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.

It’s not whether you get knocked down, its whether you get back up.

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.

Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions, but those who kindly reprove thy faults.

Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.

I wish for you the wisdom to realize that forgiveness has nothing to do with an apology.

What a new face courage puts on everything!

We run to win, not just to be in the race.

All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.

Sincerity is the highest complement you can pay.

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit – not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviate from their graves.