Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws.

Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.

What your heart thinks is great, is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.

Reality is a sliding door.

Our faith comes in moments… yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.

Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself.

When you ascend the hill of prosperity, may you not meet a friend.

The pest of society are the egotist, they are dull and bright, sacred and profane, course and fine. It is a disease that like the flu falls on all constitutions.

He liked to like people, therefore people liked him.

Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.

Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.

Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.

Men are born to succeed, not to fail.

A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil that good may come of it.

He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.

Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.

How could a man be satisfied with a decision between such alternatives and under such circumstances? No more than he can be satisfied with his hat, which he’s chosen from among such shapes as the resources of the age offer him, wearing it at best with a resignation which is chiefly supported by comparison.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.