Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only reward of virtue is virtue the only way to have a friend is to be one.

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

Adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience.

Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.

The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.

What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.

There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses.

That’s what I can’t stand. I know I’ll bounce back, and that’s what I can’t stand.

The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. But he won’t sit upon a cold stove lid, either.

It was prettily devised of Aesop, The fly sat on the axle tree of the chariot wheel and said, what dust do I raise!

The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.

Important encounters are planned by the souls long before the bodies see each other.

Every old poem is sacred.

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them.

The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.

For death is no more than turning us over from time to eternity.

The Country is both the Philosopher’s Garden and his Library, in which he Reads and Contemplates the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God.

Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.