Ralph Waldo Emerson

Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.

Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms.

Self-sacrifice is the real miracle out of which all the reported miracles grow.

A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace, and not pollute the morning.

Nature has always had more force than education.

Every man is an impossibility until he is born.

There are two great rules of life, the one general and the other particular. The first is that everyone can, in the end get what he wants if he only tries. This is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is more or less an exception to the general rule.

Nothing in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself, something that encompasses you but is not defined by your existence alone.

Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one’s heart; but death is a splendid thing –a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.

A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

The dead should be judged like criminals, impartially, but they should be allowed the benefit of the doubt.

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

To inherit property is not to be born – it is to be still-born, rather.

Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind.

The more you know the less you understand.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.