Ralph Waldo Emerson

What your heart thinks is great, is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.

There is always a best way of doing everything.

The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it cannot be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.

There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace, and not pollute the morning.

A few strong instincts and a few plain rules suffice us.

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

Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.

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

He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.

Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.

Every man believes that he has greater possibilities.

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.

Man was made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.

There be three things which make a nation great and prosperous: a fertile soil, busy workshops, easy conveyance for men and goods from place to place.

Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.

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

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

I do not like work even when someone else does it.

Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.

All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.

All mankind love a lover.