Ralph Waldo Emerson

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.

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

Men who for truth and honor’s sake stand fast and suffer long. Brave men who work while others sleep. Who dare while others fly.They build a nation’s pillars deep. And lift them to the sky.

Every man is an impossibility until he is born.

All successful men have agreed in one thing – they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things.

Every man I meet is in some way my superior.

Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge.

You have to accept whatever comes, and the only important thing is that you meet it with the best you have to give.

A heart well prepared for adversity in bad times hopes, and in good times fears for a change in fortune.

To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

The aim of spiritual life is to awaken a joyful freedom, a benevolent and compassionate heart in spite of everything.

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.

Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air. It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog’s life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.

Wine makes a man better pleased with himself. I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others… This is one of the disadvantages of wine, it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

Human ‘beans’ is the only animals that is killing their own kind.

Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion.

People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.

I don’t want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.

My chief want in life is someone who shall make me do what I can.