Ralph Waldo Emerson

If we live truly, we shall see truly.

The best efforts of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

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.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.

The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.

The late M. Venizelos observed that in all her wars Englandhe should have said Britain, of coursealways wins one battlethe last.

Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

That things are changed, and that nothing really perishes, and that the sum of matter remains exactly the same, is sufficiently certain.

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.

Wine makes a man better pleased with himself. I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others… This is one of the disadvantages of wine, it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles with it.

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.

You see things; and you say Why? But I dream things that never were; and I say Why not?

Glances of true beauty can be seen in the faces of those who live in true meekness.

Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here.

It doesn’t matter that your dream came true if you spent your whole life sleeping.

Whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it.

The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.