Ralph Waldo Emerson

The line of beauty is the line of perfect economy.

As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune, and when you have it, it requires ten times as much skill to keep it.

Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory.

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

If men be good, government cannot be bad.

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.

No man is fit to command another that cannot command himself.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?

Named must your fear be before banish it you can.

Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they’re yours.

The mind can go in a thousand directions, but on this beautiful path, I walk in peace.

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.

The years teach much what the days never knew.

Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

There are a whole lot of things in this world of ours you haven’t started wondering about yet.