Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

Adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.

The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself; nothing, but the triumph of principles.

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.

Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.

Only the traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better.

It is a brave thing to have courage to be an individual; it is also, perhaps, a lonely thing. But it is better than not being an individual, which is to be nobody at all.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.

The mind can go in a thousand directions, but on this beautiful path, I walk in peace.

Acorns were good until bread was found.

To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they know quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?

Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.

We are all alike, on the inside.

Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy as dark as a buried Babylon.

For the most important decisions in your life, trust your intuition, and then work with everything you have, to prove it right.

I am not an optimist, but a great believer of hope.