Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you believe in fate, believe in it, at least, for your good.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

It is always so pleasant to be generous, though very vexatious to pay debts.

A true friend is somebody who can make us do what we can.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.

I was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolisher.

Use every distraction as an object of meditation and they cease to be distractions.

So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.

Love truth, but pardon error.

Don’t call a woman a bitch. Call her an ass-hole. It still gets your point across and it’s not sexist.

A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

Knowledge comes by eyes always open and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power.

I don’t do quagmires.

For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocency, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent: his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil: for without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced.

Gross and obscure natures, however decorated, seem impure shambles; but character gives splendor to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and gray hairs.

No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

Creativity is a consequence of action, not its motivation. Do what needs to be done and then ask whether it was possible.

The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.

A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavor to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures.