Ralph Waldo Emerson

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.

Who can guess how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes?

No matter how often you are defeated, you are born to victory.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.

A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.

Worrying is like paying on a debt that may never come due.

Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?

I’m not a teacher: only a fellow-traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead – ahead of myself as well as you.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Nothing external to you has any power over you.

I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.

Temperate temperance is best; intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance.

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.

I tell you there isn’t a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it’s bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way; it had better been left to the men.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,Here once the embattled farmers stood,And fired the shot heard round the world.

There is little difference in people, but that little difference makes a big difference. That little difference is attitude. The big difference is whether it is positive or negative.

Each time you learn something new you must readjust the whole framework of your knowledge

Many might go to Heaven with half the labor they go to hell.