Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fame is proof that the people are gullible.

All promise outruns performance.

Every man is a consumer and ought to be a producer.

To fill the hour – that is happiness.

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and new.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God’s handwriting – a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.

Fortune is like the market, where, many times, if you can stay a little, the price will fall.

Tis God gives skill, but not without men’s hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius’s violins without Antonio.

Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content.

The natural law of inertia: Matter will remain at rest or continue in uniform motion in the same straight line unless acted upon by some external force.

At the end of my life, with just one breath left, if you come, I’ll sit up and sing.

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.

We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead – and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.

Pleasure that is obtained by unreasonable and unsuitable cost, must always end in pain.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.

A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.

How pleasant it is for a father to sit at his child’s board. It is like an aged man reclining under the shadow of an oak which he has planted.

My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.