Ralph Waldo Emerson

Children are all foreigners.

A man’s library is a sort of harem.

Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol and an audience is electrified.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

I have lived with several Zen masters – all of them cats.

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg…

Never let formal education get in the way of your learning.

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is ajar.

Any experience of reality is indescribable!

He who would begun has half done. Dare to be wise; begin.

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

If a better system is thine, impart it; if not, make use of mine.

There is a wisdom of the head, and there is a wisdom of the heart.

No man is much regarded by the rest of the world. He that considers how little he dwells upon the condition of others, will learn how little the attention of others is attracted by himself. While we see multitudes passing before us, of whom perhaps not one appears to deserve our notice or excites our sympathy, we should remember, that we likewise are lost in the same throng, that the eye which happens to glance upon us is turned in a moment on him that follows us, and that the utmost which we can reasonably hope or fear is to fill a vacant hour with prattle, and be forgotten.

It’s easy to have faith in yourself and have discipline when you’re a winner, when you’re number one. What you got to have is faith and discipline when you’re not a winner.

We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.

Only a man’s character is the real criterion of worth.