Ralph Waldo Emerson

No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic also.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

Society is a hospital of incurables.

The true artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.

In this magical hour, as the black ink sky fades to forget-me-not grey and the Cyprus trees emerge from the shadows, I tune in to my heart. In clarity, I choose to step into freedom to bring lightness of being and to be love.

The physical world, including our bodies, is a response of the observer. We create our bodies as we create the experience of our world.

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

He that outlives a wife whom he has long loved, sees himself disjoined from the only mind that has the same hopes, and fears, and interest; from the only companion with whom he has shared much good and evil; and with whom he could set his mind at liberty, to retrace the past or anticipate the future. The continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Have a care, therefore, where there is more sail than ballast.

Really great people make you feel that you, too, can become great.

One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen’s miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.

I know no religion that destroys courtesy, civility, and kindness.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

What we become depends on what our fathers teach us.

He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils: for Time is the greatest innovator: and if Time, of course, alter things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?.

No matter how hard the past is, we can always begin again.

It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.

I’ve also learned that a real mouth-smile always has an eye-smile to go with it. So watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you but his eyes stay the same. It’s sure to be a phony.