Ralph Waldo Emerson

We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.

The good news is that the moment you decide that what you know is more important than what you have been taught to believe, you will have shifted gears in your quest for abundance. Success comes from within, not from without.

Why should we be cowed by the name of Action?

Not gold but only men can makeA people great and strong;Men who for truth and honors sakeStand fast and suffer long. Brave men who work while others sleep,Who dare while others flyThey build a nations pillars deepAnd lift them to the sky.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.

The most luxurious possession, the richest treasure anybody has, is his personal dignity.

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

The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

It is vain for the coward to flee; death follows close behind; it is only by defying it that the brave escape.

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

Every man who attacks my belief, diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy; and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy.

Lack of money is the root of all evil.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.

The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

The cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy. It is the only dictator that free man acknowledges. It is the only security that free man desires.

No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades, that of government.