Ralph Waldo Emerson

Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.

People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.

Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations.

No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby-so helpless and so ridiculous.

Self-trust is the essence of heroism.

Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.

What right have I to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder?

At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.

The key to every man is his thought. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.

Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.

I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.

Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature – if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you – know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse.

Go into the street, and give one man a lecture on morality, and another a shilling, and see which will respect you most.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

People ignore the thing they have the most power over. I know so many people who will go to a protest and do something big on an issue. But they won’t deal with that issue in their home.