Ralph Waldo Emerson

With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.

Trust instinct to the end, even though you can give no reason.

There is always a best way of doing everything.

It happened once that a youth and a maiden beheld each other in a public assembly for the first time

By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little, you gain the great.

The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know. The persons who compose our company, converse, and come and go, and design and execute many things, and somewhat comes of it all, but an unlooked for result. The individual is always mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors, quarrelled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done; all are a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new, and very unlike what he promised himself.

Wisdom is better than silver and gold. I was hopeless, now I’m on hope road.

Passion is the mob of the man, that commits a riot upon his reason.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

Dear to us are those who love us… but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.

No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.

We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.

They must first judge themselves, that presume to censure others: And such will not be apt to overshoot the Mark. We are too ready to retaliate, rather than forgive, or gain by Love and Information. And yet we could hurt no Man that we believe loves us. Let us then try what Love will do: For if Men did once see we Love them, we should soon find they would not harm us. Force may subdue, but Love gains: And he that forgives first, wins the [Laurel]. If I am even with my Enemy, the Debt is paid; but if I forgive it, I oblige him for ever.

All my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it.

No man is fit to command another that cannot command himself.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.

The newspaper that obstructs the law on a trivial pretext, for money’s sake, is a dangerous enemy to the public weal.That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

The fewer our wants the more we resemble the Gods.