Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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

Do that which is assigned to you and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.

We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves…

Genius Borrows nobly.

The studious class are their own victims: they are thin and pale, their feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the day a fear of interruption –pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism.

Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.

Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn’t be anything for us to do.

Suffering is but another name for the teaching of experience, which is the parent of instruction and the schoolmaster of life.

If a man’s fortune does not fit him, it is like the shoe in the story; if too large it trips him up, if too small it pinches him.

All of our actions take their hue from the complexion of the heart, as landscapes their variety from light.

Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods.

It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire and many things to fear.

The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

There is not human being from whom we cannot learn something if we are interested enough to dig deep.

Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain’t so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.

If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.

Nothing is black or white.