Ralph Waldo Emerson

Half a man’s wisdom goes with his courage.

Travel is a fools paradise.

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.

Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused, when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.

That man is idle who can do something better.

Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.

He who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything.

Sir, he throws away his money without thought and without merit. I do not call a tree generous that sheds its fruit at every breeze.

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

It’s powerful to have strong men but what does that strength mean?

Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.

A man must make his opportunity, as oft as find it.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

If it doesn’t matter who wins or loses, then why do they keep score?

Dharma is what the Buddha taught. It is the way of understanding and love-how to understand, how to love, how to make understanding and love into real things.

The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder – in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.

We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.

When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.