Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.

The people are to be taken in small doses.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory.

Every man believes that he has greater possibilities.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

Why harass with eternal purposes a mind to weak to grasp them?

There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man’s self.

Real practice has no purpose or direction, so it can include everything that comes.

A continual feast of commendation is only to be obtained by merit or by wealth: many are therefore obliged to content themselves with single morsels, and recompense the infrequency of their enjoyment by excess and riot, whenever fortune sets the banquet before them.

I don’t let my mouth say nothin’ my head can’t stand.

Gross and obscure natures, however decorated, seem impure shambles; but character gives splendor to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and gray hairs.

Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.

Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist’s custom.

Tomorrow is an old deceiver, and his cheat never grows stale.

The poets aim is either to profit or to please, or to blend in one the delightful and the useful. Whatever the lesson you would convey, be brief, that your hearers may catch quickly what is said and faithfully retain it. Every superfluous word is spilled from the too-full memory.

To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.

Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.

Practice is this life, and realization is this life, and this life is revealed right here and now.