Ralph Waldo Emerson

What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say

The eloquent man is he who is no eloquent speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

Here’s the thing: the world is not going to issue you an engraved invitation to this life.

They have a right to censure that have a heart to help: the rest is cruelty, not justice.

Live, let live, and help live

The wretched have no compassion, they can do good only from strong principles of duty.

The walking of Man is falling forwards.

A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.

How does it happen, Maecenas, that no one is content with that lot of which he has chosen or which chance has thrown his way, but praises those who follow a different course?

He who has provoked the shaft of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.

Who has not felt the beauty of a woman’s arm? The unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently-lessening curves, down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm softness.

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.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.

If you are in a poker game and after 20 minutes you don’t know who the patsy is, then you’re the patsy.

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.

Who shall set a limit to the influence of a human being?