Ralph Waldo Emerson

The reward of a thing well done is having done it.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God’s handwriting – a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.

The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.

Men who for truth and honor’s sake stand fast and suffer long. Brave men who work while others sleep. Who dare while others fly.They build a nation’s pillars deep. And lift them to the sky.

We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.

Pride is seldom delicate; it will please itself with very mean advantages.

As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

Let him that would move the world, first move himself.

If you live for people’s acceptance, you’ll die from their rejections.

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.

Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, neverin nothing, great or small, large or pettynever give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.

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.

Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich, something for nothing.

The government who robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

The wise man applauds he who he thinks most virtuous; the rest of the world applauds the wealthy.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

Love truth, but pardon error.

He that has more knowledge than judgment, is made for another man’s use more than his own.