Ralph Waldo Emerson

Courage consists in equality to the problem before us.

All promise outruns performance.

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

No one has a prosperity so high and firm that two or three words can’t dishearten it.

Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly-full of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.

A lot of power and bravery is practice. And some of that is taking the risk to try and be at the table. And then when you’re at the table, taking that first risk to open your mouth and risk being rejected.

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

What do we live for; if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?

With a burst of joy, my heels sprout wings, smile dancing. My heart sings like a bird caged, set free to soar, senses heightened like never before. Life. Is. Good.

There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.

In the long run you hit only what you aim at. Therefore, though you should fail immediately, you had better aim at something high.

Danger – if you meet it promptly and without flinching – you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!

My love for you was like a poem I wrote; one that I disregarded as average. Torn out, thrown away to the rubbish heap, waiting; wishing to be picked up and appreciated by someone else, for the masterpiece that it is.

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not an example.

I am not able to instruct you. I can only tell that I have chosen wrong. I have passed my time in study without experience; in the attainment of sciences which can, for the most part, be but remotely useful to mankind. I have purchased knowledge at the expense of all the common comforts of life: I have missed the endearing elegance of female friendship, and the happy commerce of domestic tenderness.

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

That which builds is better than that which is built.

Branching streams cannot compare to the source.

Prosperity is the best protector of principle.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.