Ralph Waldo Emerson

Don’t be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don’t bewail and moan. Omit the negative propositions. Challenge us with incessant affirmatives. Don’t waste yourself in rejection, or bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make that man another you. One’s enough.

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

See only that thou work and thou canst not escape the reward.

In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.

Already know you that which you need.

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.

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

It is admirable to consider how many Millions of People come into, and go out of the World, Ignorant of themselves, and of the World they have lived in.

How great, my friends, is the virtue of living upon a little!

I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

Fear always springs from ignorance.

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

Life must be filled up, and the man who is not capable of intellectual pleasures must content himself with such as his senses can afford.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

I’ve also learned that a real mouth-smile always has an eye-smile to go with it. So watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you but his eyes stay the same. It’s sure to be a phony.

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

Wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses.

How you gonna win if you ain’t right within?