Ralph Waldo Emerson

As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.

Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint.

Talent for talent’s sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.

Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with celestial air, until it eclipses the sun and moon.

If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Enough or not…it will have to do.

All I can do is be me, whoever that is.

It’s hard to see your own face without a mirror.

In ceremonies of the horsemen, even the pawn must hold a grudge.

If we were all just alike, one of us wouldn’t be necessary.

Everyone faces the challenge of finding meaning to their suffering.

We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.

You deserve to give yourself the same love that you give to everyone else.

When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.

The satisfaction that arises from honest accomplishment is of far more value in the promotion of human happiness than the thrill that comes with the realization of materialistic aspirations.

Boredom: the desire for desires.

Be bad, but at least don’t be a liar, a deceiver!

We don’t see the things the way they are. We see things the way WE are.

This morning I woke with my ear pressed between shoulder blades. Every inhale, every drum, every pump, thump of your heartbeat said one thing – home, home, home.

Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.