Ralph Waldo Emerson

What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say

Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods loved him because men hated him.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind.

The virtue in most request is conformity.

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.

Duties are not performed for duty’s sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty -the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.

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

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

Nothing is so exhilarating in life as to be shot at with no result.

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected

The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

We are prisoners of ideas.

Nothing does Reason more Right, than the Coolness of those that offer it: for Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers.

George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.

What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.

To choose time is to save time.