Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no one who does not exaggerate!

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.

Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will or against his will he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a threadball thrown at a mark, but the other end remains on the thrower.

Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

You can free yourself from aging by reinterpreting your body and by grasping the link between belief and biology.

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it – and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again – and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

Being is the great explainer.

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

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most. God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

Fear always springs from ignorance.

When you do the wrong thing, knowing it is wrong, you do so because you haven’t developed the habit of effectively controlling or neutralizing strong inner urges that tempt you, or because you have established the wrong habit and don’t know how to eliminate them effectively.

One little bird not larger than a sparrow, it may have been a Phalarope, would alight on the turbulent surface where the breakers were five or six feet high, and float buoyantly there like a duck, cunningly taking to its wings and lifting itself a few feet through the air over the foaming crest of each breaker, but sometimes outriding safely a considerable billow which hid it some seconds, when its instinct told it that it would not break. It was a little creature thus to sport with the ocean, but it was as perfect a success in its way as the breakers in theirs.