Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.

Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.

The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

Self-trust is the essence of heroism.

Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.

Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.

The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting.

Do not bring people in your life who weigh you down. And trust your instincts … good relationships feel good. They feel right. They don’t hurt. They’re not painful. That’s not just with somebody you want to marry, but it’s with the friends that you choose. It’s with the people you surround yourselves with.

Your own safety is at stake when your neighbor’s house is in flames.

Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.

Patience makes lighter What sorrow may not heal.

The lofty pine is oftenest shaken by the winds; High towers fall with a heavier crash; And the lightning strikes the highest mountain.

I am the captain of my soul.

Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.

It happened once that a youth and a maiden beheld each other in a public assembly for the first time

In fine, he that is drunk is not a Man: Because he is so long void of Reason, that distinguishes a Man from a Beast.

It is wonderful to think how men of very large estates not only spend their yearly income, but are often actually in want of money. It is clear, they have not value for what they spend.

It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, Know thyself, and too often leads to a self-estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.

Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.