Ralph Waldo Emerson

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.

The only prudence in life is concentration.

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

If a man’s eye is on the Eternal, his intellect will grow.

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

The next best thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one.

It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.

A fly may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

Wise men make more opportunities than they find.

We must set up a strong present tense against all rumors of wrath, past and to come.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

Temperate temperance is best; intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance.

Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.

It isn’t safe to sit in judgment upon another person’s illusion when you are not on the inside. While you are thinking it is a dream, he may be knowing it is a planet.

We are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time or interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift, our personal association, which means so much to them, we give grudgingly.

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.

As you get older, you realize that no one has all the answers. It turns out that life is an exercise in living with the certainty of uncertainty. – Jason Kilar

A stumbling block to the pessimist is a stepping-stone to the optimist.

Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.