Ralph Waldo Emerson

If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.

The greatest homage we can pay truth is to use it.

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

Society is a hospital of incurables.

The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?

Bondage is… subjection to external influences and internal negative thoughts and attitudes.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

The secret of being a bore… is to tell everything.

The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near.

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

What ever the motive for the insult, it is always best to overlook it; for folly doesn’t deserve resentment, and malice is punished by neglect.

Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man; but I call him an unsociable man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good.

Truth is neither alive nor dead; it just aggravates itself all the time.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

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

Travel is a fools paradise.

No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself.

Things do not change; we change.

It is a happy talent to know how to play.

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.