Ralph Waldo Emerson

Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it cannot be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.

All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.

He who has provoked the shaft of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.

These are not dark days: these are great days – the greatest days our country has ever lived.

In all debates let truth be thy aim; not victory or an unjust interest; and endeavor to gain rather than to expose thy antagonist.

Success must include two things: the development of an individual to his utmost potentiality and a contribution of some kind to one’s world.

Writers are the engineers of human souls.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again. The world is not yet exhausted; let me see something tomorrow which I never saw before.

So many fail because they don’t get started – they don’t go. They don’t overcome inertia. They don’t begin.

Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.

Nothing external to you has any power over you.

I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

How many are the things I can do without!

Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.

God has placed no limits to the exercise of the intellect he has given us, on this side of the grave.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.